American Ghosts

I was a teenager the first time I read Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and its haunted landscape was disconcerting. From the mention of tombstone dates in the first few pages to its ending among cemetery ghosts, Our Town’s fictional terrain is thick with loss, death, mortality—something I didn’t quite understand but recognized enough to want to turn away from the story. We see characters walking around and know that they will die and how it will happen.