Written 1937

“This is the way we were: in our growing up, and in our marrying and in our living, and in our dying.”

Act 1, Our Town

Why I Chose This Book

I have always loved reading, and, as a kid, I would read anything I could get my hands on. Then came high school literature classes and assigned reading. An efficient way to destroy a love of reading. I am still resentful of the hours lost to Melville and Billy Bud. However, in my junior year, we did a unit on Plays and it was great. My teacher wisely started us off with Arsenic and Old Lace. (If you are not familiar with Arsenic and Old Lace, you should definitely read it or watch the movie with Cary Grant) We read some other great plays as well, but we didn’t read Our Town. 

Our Town is one of those plays so often mentioned in popular culture that it could easily be assumed that everyone has read it or seen a production. However, I don’t think I have actually read a play since that high school class, and if Our Town has ever been performed locally, I wasn’t aware of it. So, when I joined the Classics Club Challenge, it seemed the perfect time to pick up a play again. Until I added it to my list, I hadn’t even registered that the playwright was also the author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is one of my favorite books.

About Our Town

What struck me about the play from the start were similarities to a classic Polish book I recently finished – The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski. In both works, as the omniscient narrator introduces some characters, the reader is told how and when the characters will die. In both works, there is a focus on the fragility of life and the senselessness of war. It brought back to me the striking ways in which reading one great work of literature can inform readings of other great works. 

I’m not a theater connoisseur, but I feel like Our Town must have been very modern when it was first performed on January 22, 1938. The starkness of the stage would have drawn all the focus to the characters and what they were saying. 

Although set in between the years of 1901-1913 in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, this drama has a timeless feel. For instance, the opening scene is as familiar today as it was and will be at any time in the future. There are two homes on stage where parents are trying to get their children out of bed and out the door, so they will be at school on time. Later, children ask for increased allowances and siblings taunt one another. Couples fall in love, and people die. All situations that we can as easily visualize happening today.

However, there are also some situations that may feel a bit more alien in 2024. It was common in 1901 for people to marry right out of high school, so Emily is 17 when she is the bride in Act 2. 

But this drama is about more than familiarity. It addresses issues of community and what it means to belong to a community and what people owe to one another within a community. The people of the town of Grover’s Corners know that Simon Stimson is an alcoholic who has been through very hard times. When he shows up drunk to choir practice, one woman says to another, “The only thing the rest of us can do is not to notice it.” When the local police officer sees Stimson’s wife heading out searching for him one evening, the officer hurries away and pretends he doesn’t see her. Then, ironically, after ignoring the drunk, stumbling choir director, the newspaper editor heads home singing “Blessed be the tie the binds,” a hymn about how Christians love, support, and care for one another. The community clearly felt that by pretending nobody noticed Stimson’s pain, it would allow him dignity. Stimson committed suicide between the second and third acts.

Throughout the drama we learn of the loss of several young lives. In the final act of the play, one of the characters discovers that even in life’s beautiful moments people aren’t appreciating what they have. People aren’t living in the moment or taking the time to really see and appreciate one another, not even people they love. 

I’m very pleased I finally took the time to read this. It is the second book I’ve read for the Classics Club Challenge.

Do human beings ever realize life while they live it
The saints and poets maybe they do – some

Act 3, Our Town

About the Author

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He won 3 Pulitzer Prizes, including one for Our Town. He wrote extensively, both plays, a screenplay, novels. Additionally, he translated several works from French into English.