About the Book

In this extraordinary play, Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award.

Adapted to an Emmy Award-winning television movie, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Emma Thompson.

Margaret Edson's powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize-winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence's unifying experiences--mortality--while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away--a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, "The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity."

In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?

The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson's writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader.

As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

Review Quotes

"Among the finest plays of the decade . . . An original and urgent work of art." --David Lyons, The Wall Street Journal

"A dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day." --John Simon, New York magazine

"[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play . . . You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted." --Peter Marks, The New York Times

"A one-of-a-kind experience: wise, thoughtful, witty and wrenching." --Vincent Canby, The New York Times Year in Review

"A thrilling, exciting evening in the theater . . . [Wit is] an extraordinary and most moving play." --Clive Barnes, New York Post

"Wit is exquisite . . . an exhilarating and harrowing 90-minute revelation.
" --Linda Winer, Newsday

"Edson writes superbly . . . [A] moving, enthralling and challenging experience that reminds you what theater is for." --Fintan O'Toole, New York Daily News

About the Author

Margaret Edson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1961. She has degrees in history and literature. She wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit in 1991, after a period spent working as a clerk in the oncology/AIDS department of a Washington hospital in 1985. Edson now lives in Atlanta, where she teaches kindergarten.