Heaven's My Destination

George Brush sells educational textbooks across Depression-era America and is, by his own sincere conviction, a fundamentalist Christian. He does not drink, smoke, lie, or take unfair advantage. He believes that God is watching him and that it matters how he acts. He is genuinely, absolutely good — and everywhere he goes, he is a disaster.

Heaven’s My Destination is Thornton Wilder’s funniest novel, and one of the great comic works of 20th-century American fiction. George Brush is not a hypocrite — that would be easy. He is entirely sincere, and the comedy comes from the collision between his sincere goodness and a world that has no idea what to do with it. He tries to reform a bank robber. He attempts to pay back wages to a man who doesn’t want them. He leaves chaos and bewilderment behind him in every town.

Wilder’s treatment of Brush is carefully balanced: the novel is clearly affectionate about its protagonist’s sincerity while also finding it comic in its impossibility. There is no mockery here of religious conviction itself — Wilder is too serious and too intelligent for that — but there is a sustained comic argument about what it would actually look like to try to live according to one’s stated beliefs in the world as it actually is.

Reading Guides

• Thornton Wilder Books in Order
• Where to Start with Thornton Wilder

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Heaven’s My Destination apart: Genuinely funny — one of the great comic American novels; George Brush is an unforgettable creation; and The Depression-era America setting is vivid. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Heaven’s My Destination give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Religious sincerity in a secular world as comic premise and moral argument. Depression-era America and its roads and boarding houses. The gap between intention and effect in the life of a principled man. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Thornton Wilder’s prose in Heaven’s My Destination is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

Less philosophically ambitious than other Wilder. Some readers find Brush’s sincere religiosity frustrating even as comedy. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers who enjoy literary comedy, American fiction of the 1930s, or Wilder’s complete works

George Brush and the Comedy of Sincerity

What makes George Brush funny is not hypocrisy — that is easy comedy, and Wilder does not stoop to it — but sincerity. Brush means every word he says and does every thing he believes. He will not lie. He will not take advantage. He gives money away when he has more than he needs and expects others to do the same when they have more than he needs. He is, in the strictest sense, a fool — not in intelligence, which he possesses in quantity, but in the way that the theological tradition means fool: someone who takes the religious demands of his faith literally and acts accordingly, in a world that has agreed to take them metaphorically.

The result is that everywhere George Brush goes, he is a problem. He is a problem for the people he tries to help, who do not want the kind of help he offers. He is a problem for the people he tries to reform, who are not interested in reformation. He is a problem for the women who find him attractive but cannot get him to behave in the ways that conventional courtship requires. The comedy is sustained and inventive, but it is always comedy about something serious: what it would actually cost to live by the principles most people profess to hold.

Depression-Era America

Heaven’s My Destination is set in the early 1930s, and Wilder uses the Depression as a context for Brush’s particular brand of economic idealism. Brush believes in honest business, fair wages, and the equal distribution of surplus — principles that are either irrelevant or actively threatening to the economic arrangements of Depression-era America. His attempts to apply them produce disasters that are both funny and, on reflection, illuminating about the gap between professed American values and actual American economic life. Wilder was not primarily a social satirist, but there is real satirical bite in his portrait of a country that nominally professes Christian economic ethics and organises itself on entirely different principles.

The Depression-era setting also gives the novel its geography: the roads and boarding houses and traveling salesmen culture of 1930s America, the route maps and cheap hotels and diners that defined the life of the commercial traveller. This world is rendered with the specificity of research and imaginative sympathy, and it is one of the novel’s undervalued pleasures.

Wilder’s Comic Art

Heaven’s My Destination is the novel that proves Wilder was a complete writer — not only the elegiac, philosophical author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Woman of Andros but a genuine comic novelist capable of sustaining a 300-page joke without losing either the comedy or the seriousness beneath it. Brush is not a simple character despite being a comic one; the novel’s final pages, in which his particular kind of certainty is briefly cracked, suggest that Wilder understood the limits of his protagonist’s position as well as its pleasures. The comedy is real, and it is the vehicle for something that only comedy can carry.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.8/5 — Wilder’s funniest novel — a portrait of sincere religious conviction in a secular world, handled with affection rather than mockery. George Brush is one of the great comic characters of American fiction.