Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. His best known work is his play Our Town. He received three Pulitzer Prizes.
Early years
Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and 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.
Thornton Wilder's older
brother, Amos Niven Wilder, was Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard
Divinity School, a
noted poet, and foundational to the development of the field theopoetics. Amos was also a nationally-ranked
tennis player who competed at the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1922. His youngest 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. Additionally, Wilder had a sister and 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 at the library, his
hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference.” His
family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 1910. He
attended the English China
Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai but returned with his mother and siblings to
California in 1912 because of the unstable political conditions in China at the
time. Thornton also attended Creekside Middle School in Berkeley, and graduated
from Berkeley High School in 1915. Wilder also studied law for two years before dropping out
of Purdue University, Indianapolis.
After serving in the United States 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
After graduating, Wilder
studied in Rome and then taught French at Lawrenceville
School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. 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. He resigned from
Lawrenceville School in 1928. From 1930 to 1937 he taught at the University
of Chicago. In 1938
he won the Pulitzer
Prize for drama for
his play Our Town and he won the prize again in 1942
for his play The Skin of Our Teeth. World War
II saw him rise to
the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force
Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. He received several
awards. He went on to be a visiting professor at the University
of Hawaii and to
teach poetry at Harvard, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor. 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.
Wilder translated plays by André Obey and Jean-Paul Sartre, and wrote the libretti to two operas, Paul Hindemith's The Long Christmas Dinner and Louise Talma's The Alcestiad, based on
his own play. Also, 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 British
Prime Minister Tony Blair during the memorial service for
victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Since then its popularity has grown
enormously. The 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. Wilder suffered
from severe writer's
block while writing
the final act. Our Town employs a choric narrator called the "Stage Manager" and a minimalist set to underscore the human
experience. Wilder himself played the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in summer stock
productions. Following the daily lives of the Gibbs and Webb families as well
as the other inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, Wilder illustrates the importance
of the universality of the simple, yet meaningful lives of all people in the
world in order to demonstrate the value of appreciating life. The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize.
In 1938, Max Reinhardt directed a Broadway production of The Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder had adapted from Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842). It was a failure, closing after just
39 performances.
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—the timeless human condition; history as progressive,
cyclical, or entropic; literature, philosophy, and religion as the touchstones
of civilization. Three acts dramatize the travails of the Antrobus family,
allegorizing the alternate
history of mankind.
It was claimed by Joseph Campbell and Robert Morton Robinson, authors of A
Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake, that much of the play was the result of
unacknowledged borrowing from Joyce's last work.
In his novel Ides of March (1948), dedicated to an
anti-fascist Italian writer, Lauro de Bosis, he reflected on parallels between Benito Mussolini and Caesar. He had met Jean-Paul Sartre on a U.S. lecture tour after the
war, and was under the influence of existentialism, rejecting its atheist
implications.
In 1955, Tyrone Guthrie encouraged Wilder to rework The
Merchant of Yonkers into The Matchmaker. This time the play enjoyed a
healthy Broadway run of 486 performances with Ruth Gordon in the title role, winning a Tony Award for Guthrie, its director. It later
became the basis for the hit 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!, with a book by Michael Stewart and score by Jerry Herman.
In 1962, he lived
temporarily in the small town of Douglas, AZ where he started to pen his longest
novel The
Eighth Day. The
book went on to win the National Book Award.
His last novel, Theophilus
North, was published in 1973. In 2009, the Library of America republished
the first five novels, six early stories, and four essays on fiction in one
volume. Later novels are to be in a
forthcoming volume.
Personal life
Although Wilder never
discussed being gay publicly or in his writings, his close friend Samuel Steward is generally acknowledged to have
been a lover. Wilder was introduced to Steward by Gertrude Stein, who at the time regularly
corresponded with the both of them. The third act of Our Town was famously
drafted during a brief affair with Steward in Zurich on their first meeting.
Wilder had a wide circle of
friends and enjoyed mingling with other famous people, including Ernest Hemingway, Russel Wright, Willa Cather, and Montgomery Clift. On December 7, 1975 he died in Hamden,
Connecticut, where
he lived for many years with his sister, Isabel. He was interred at
Hamden's Mount Carmel Cemetery.
Bibliography
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):
- The Long Christmas Dinner
- Queens
of France
- Pullman
Car Hiawatha
- Love and How to Cure It
- Such Things Only Happen in Books
- The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
- Our Town (1938) –
Pulitzer Prize
- The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)
- The Skin
of Our Teeth (1942) –
Pulitzer Prize
- The Matchmaker (1954) (revised from The Merchant of
Yonkers)
- The Alcestiad: Or, A Life In The Sun (1955)
- Childhood (1960)
- Infancy (1960)
- Plays for
Bleecker Street (1962)
|
- The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder
Volume I (1997):
- The Long Christmas Dinner
- Queens
of France
- Pullman
Car Hiawatha
- Love and How to Cure It
- Such Things Only Happen in Books
- The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
- The
Drunken Sisters
- Bernice
- The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five
- A
Ringing of Doorbells
- In
Shakespeare and the Bible
- Someone
from Assisi
- Cement
Hands
- Infancy
- Childhood
- Youth
- The Rivers Under the Earth
|
Novels
wikipedia.org