Volume 50, Number 19 · December 4, 2003
Chasing After Providence
By John Updike
The Eighth Day was published in late March of 1967, three weeks before Thornton Wilder's seventieth birthday. Reviews were mixed, from Edmund Wilson's calling it 'the best thing he ever wrote' to Edith Oliver's judgment, in The New Yorker, that 'none of the characters, major or minor, is essentially credible to the reader' and Stanley Kaufmann's, in The New Republic, that 'we have—from a man who has always meant well—a book that means nothing.' Nevertheless, Wilder's first novel in nearly twenty years had Book-of-the-Month-Club endorsement, spent twenty-five weeks on the best-seller list, and won the 1968 National Book Award. I was one of the judges, much the youngest; the other two were Granville Hicks and Josephine Herbst. Hicks and I wanted the award to go to Wilder; Herbst gracefully acceded, and my two senior colleagues asked me to write the citation. On the spot I scratched it off:
Feature, 2741 words
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