Reading Order
Night Reading Order
Elie Wiesel's Night (1960, originally Un di velt hot geshvign in Yiddish, 1956) is the essential Holocaust memoir — Wiesel's account of his deportation from the Hungarian town of Sighet to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald at the age of fifteen. The first of three autobiographical novels that form a loose trilogy (Night, Dawn, Day), Night is the book Wiesel spent ten years unable to write, so traumatic was the experience of transforming his experience into language. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and Night is one of the most widely read books in the world, taught in schools across the United States and Europe.
Where to start
Night
Complete Night Book List
- 1Buy
Night
Elie Wiesel·1960·Start here — the essential memoir; approximately 120 pages in most editions. - 2Buy
Dawn
Elie Wiesel·1961·The companion novel — Elisha, a Holocaust survivor and now a Jewish underground fighter in British Mandatory Palestine, who must execute an English officer at dawn. Less memoir than Night, more a philosophical novel. - 3Buy
Day
Elie Wiesel·1962·The third part of the loose trilogy — Elisha in New York, struck by a taxi, confronting whether he wants to live. Also published as The Accident in some editions.
Night — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Night a memoir or fiction?
Night is a memoir — Elie Wiesel's account of his own experience. It began as a 900-page Yiddish testimony, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), published in Argentina in 1956 as part of a series of Holocaust testimonies. Wiesel condensed it to approximately 120 pages in French, La Nuit, with the help of François Mauriac, who also wrote the preface. The book has been revised once since its original publication in French, most substantially in Marion Wiesel's 2006 English translation. Dawn and Day are novels inspired by his experience rather than memoirs.
What should I read next after Night?
Wiesel readers continue with Dawn and Day to complete the trilogy. For readers who want more Holocaust testimony, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Maus by Art Spiegelman, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, and Imre Kertész's Fatelessness are the essential companions.
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