Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist.

Life

Family

Born Thornton Niven Wilder in Madison, Wisconsin, he was the son of Amos Parker Wilder a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Niven Wilder. All of the Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China due to their father's work.

Wilder's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder was Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School and a noted poet. His younger sister Isabel Wilder was an accomplished writer. Both of his other sisters, Charlotte Wilder (a noted poet) and Janet Wilder Dakin (a zoologist), attended Mount Holyoke College and were excellent students. Wilder also had a twin brother who died at birth.

Education

Wilder began writing plays while at The Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual. According to a classmate, “We left him alone, just left him alone. And he would retire to the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference.” His family lived for a time in Berkeley, California where his sister Janet was born in 1910. Thornton attended Emerson Elementary School in Berkeley, and graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915.

After serving in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War I, he attended Oberlin College before earning his B.A. at Yale University in 1920, where he refined his writing skills as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity, a literary society. He earned his M.A. in French from Princeton University in 1926.

Career

In 1926 Wilder's first novel The Cabala was published. In 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success and his first Pulitzer Prize in 1928. From 1930 to 1937 he taught at the University of Chicago. In 1938 and 1943 he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. World War II saw him rise to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Air Force and receive several awards. He went on to be a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii and to teach poetry at Harvard. Though he considered himself a teacher first and a writer second, he continued to write all his life, receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1957 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. In 1967 he won the National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day. He died in his sleep, December 7, 1975 in Hamden, Connecticut, where he had been living with his sister Isabel for many years.

Wilder was good at dealing with a large number of people, including Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Montgomery Clift and Gertrude Stein. Although he never discussed his homosexuality publicly or in his writings, his close friend Samuel M. Steward is considered to have been his lover.

Works

Wilder authored numerous plays, novels, and a variety of shorter works including essays, one act plays, and scholarly articles. He also translated and wrote the libretti to two operas. Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired, asked him to write the screenplay to his thriller, Shadow of a Doubt.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them. Philosophically, the book explores the problem of evil, or the question of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem "innocent" or "undeserving".

It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and in 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. The book was quoted by Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Since then its popularity has grown enormously.

This book is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events before the disaster.

Wilder was the author of Our Town, a popular play (and later film) set in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. It was inspired by his friend Gertrude Stein's novel The Making of Americans, and many elements of Stein's deconstructive style can be found throughout the work. Our Town employs a choric narrator called the "Stage Manager" and a minimalist set to underscore the universality of human experience. (Wilder himself played the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in summer stock productions.) The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize. Wilder suffered from severe writer's block while writing the final act.

His play The Skin of Our Teeth opened in New York on November 18, 1942 with Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead in the lead roles. Again, the themes are familiar--war, pestilence, economic depression, fire. Ignoring the limits of time and space, just four characters and three acts are used to review the history of mankind.

The Matchmaker, a farcical play based on Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842), was adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly! by Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman.

His last novel, Theophilus North, was published in 1973.

Novels by Thornton Wilder

Plays

The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926)
An Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1928)
The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931) which includes
Our Town (1938)
The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)
The Matchmaker (1954) (revised from The Merchant of Yonkers)
Childhood (1960)
Infancy (1960)
Plays for Bleecker Street (1962)
Or, A Life In The Sun (1977)

External links

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