Our town
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.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2019–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 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.
- Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury
Murder in the Cathedral - T. S. Eliot
Our Town - Thornton Wilder
- I remember being like you describe at your age. Everyone in this is thread is saying great things and I don't need to repeat them, so I'll mention something different that 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 books and plays said to me.
- 1. Cory Doctorow - Walkaway. A near-future realistic fiction that takes the concept of Wiki, Open Source, Free Software, anarchy, and post-scarcity to a very exciting conclusion. Dramatically radicalized my conception of the economy, the establishment, 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 and intellectually trusting sci-fi involving space vampires. Good biology. Made me seriously question the nature of consciousness.
5. Eric Hoffer - The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Dense and hard to get through old book on what it says in the title. Helped me better understand the Trump movement and similar nazi/alt-right movements that were beyond my ability to grasp before.
6. Douglas Adams - The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Helped me understand that though I may die (or the universe may end), that might be OK.
- 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 a generation or two. Each of the characters only speak once, like a epitaph, so all the way through you're putting pieces together, and by the end you're really anticipating what the key figures in a couple of the sub-plots will say. It's really cool!
