The Eighth Day

The story of The Eighth Day begins in Coaltown, Illinois, in 1902, with Breckenridge Lansing's murder and John Ashley's trial, conviction, death sentence and inexplicable escape. It follows the efforts of John Ashley's wife and children to stand up to privation and the no less harsh hostility of the town; John Ashley's long flight to a mine in the Chilean Andes; young Roger Ashley's cool-headed climb—it took all of three years—to fame and the promise of fortune in Chicago's newspaper world. And the tale casts back to John Ashley's young manhood and his lightning courtship; to Eustacia Sims's romantic dream of life with Breckenridge Lansing and the realities of that life as she found herself living it. And forward again to the solution of the Lansing murder, and further still to glimpses of the children's children.

As Our Town—each individual so singular, so actual—stands for all towns, and The Skin of Our Teeth encompasses with miraculous ease the whole life-span of the species, The Eighth Day moves back and forth through time and space, weaving the brilliant figures of Ashleys and Lansings into the vast tapestry that is human history. Seen close up, each man and woman and child invades our consciousness. We dwell on the piercing valor of fourteen-year-old Sophia Ashley; on Breckenridge Lansing's struggle toward redemption; on the exiled Russian gentlewoman in a Midwest mining town and the exiled English gentlewoman among the copperminers of the Andes; on the particular nature of John Ashley's faith. Few of our real-life fellow-creatures so persistently engage our thoughts as do these people of The Eighth Day . . . long after we have closed the book in which we met them.

The Eighth Day is Thornton Wilder's first novel since The Ides of March, which was published in 1948.