Our town
a play in three acts
by Thornton Wilder · first published 1938
80% recommend20% neutral
Thornton Wilder contemplates ordinary life events (birth, family life, marriage, and death), mostly through one character, a young woman, Emily Webb, who leads an unexamined life until she encounters death.
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…helped me. That was literature. Books and plays like "Notes From The Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky, "You Can't Go Home Again" by Thomas Wolfe, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" by Eugene O'Neill and "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder. What you are feeling is not unique and it will pass, so don't think you will feel this way forever and consequently do yourself harm. Welcome to the human condition. That's what the…
on “Ask HN: Words of encouragement for someone lost in life?” ↗Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury Murder in the Cathedral - T. S. Eliot Our Town - Thornton Wilder
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life?” ↗Recently got on a Vonnegut kick. In one of the books he calls Our Town by Thornton Wilder the best play ever written. So I went and read that. He's right. It's damned good.
on “Kurt Vonnegut at 100” ↗…politics, engineering, and my own life goals. 2. Dale Carnegie - How to Win Friends and Influence People. The definitive guidebook to interpersonal relations. Taught me empathy. 3. Thornton Wilder - Our Town. A play about a little girl who gets one more day after her death to visit her memories. I read it at 16 and it brought me to my first understanding of mortality. 4. Peter Watts - Blindsight. A romping…
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?” ↗You might enjoy reading "Spoon River Anthology", by Edgar Lee Masters, which was one of the inspirations for Our Town. It's a cycle of short free-verse testimonies "spoken" by the dead in a small town cemetery. Reading them builds up a sort of kaleidoscopic portrait of everything that went on there over the course of…
on “Thornton Wilder's Last Play Vanished into Thin Air. Or Did It?” ↗