Word: coaltown
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hero-Victim. "In the early summer of 1902," begins Wilder, "John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Five days later, at 1 in the morning of Tuesday, July 22, he escaped from his guards on the train that was carrying him to his execution...
...narrative demands a crucial, emotional confrontation, the author turns remote, reverts to brief explorations of life's enduring verities; and the reader is deprived of vital particulars. It is as if, viewing events from Olympus, Wilder sees the marvel of life but not the movement. The people of Coaltown, U.S.A. -Everytown, Universe-love, falter, hate, do good and deal in injustice, and carry on through eternity, still hanging on by the skin of their teeth, improving themselves a little as they go. In an old-fashioned mixture of Christian teaching and evolution, Dr. Gillies, Coaltown's resident philosopher...
...that last word adangle, Wilder presses home his conviction that man's story is unending and that come what may, man will prevail. The thought is unarguable, but its demonstration leaves the reader with characters who are merely symbols and a story that is an abstraction. After visiting Coaltown, readers may want to hop a fast freight to Grover's Corners, the setting of Our Town, whose scale was smaller but whose philosophy seemed almost as tangible as its strawberry sodas. Thornton Wilder remains engaging, thoughtful, a man to meet. Yet in this book, one longs for more...