Everything about Thornton Wilder totally explained
Thornton Niven Wilder (
April 17,
1897 –
December 7,
1975) was an
American playwright and
novelist. His best known work is his play
Our Town.
Life
Family history
Thornton Niven 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 twin brother, both of whom died at birth.
Education
Wilder began writing plays while at
The Thacher School in
Ojai, California, where he didn't fit in and was teased by classmates as overly
intellectual. According to a classmate, “We left him alone, just left him alone. And he'd retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference.” His family lived for a time in
California, 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 in law for two years before dropping out of college in
Berkeley.
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 and he received 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, aged 78, where he'd been living with his sister, Isabel, for many years.
Wilder had a wide circle of friends and enjoyed mingling with other famous people, including
Ernest Hemingway,
Russel Wright,
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 generally acknowledged to have been his lover.
Works
Wilder translated and wrote the
libretti to two
operas. 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.
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.) 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. Wilder suffered from severe
writer's block while writing the final act. That same year
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.
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.
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) – Pulitzer Prize
The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) – Pulitzer Prize
The Matchmaker (1954) (revised from The Merchant of Yonkers)
Childhood (1960)
Infancy (1960)
Plays for Bleecker Street (1962)
(1977)
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Volume I (1997) which includes
Collected Works
McClatchy, J. D., ed. Thornton Wilder, Collected Plays and Writings on Theater (Library of America, 2007) ISBN 978-1-59853-003-2.Further Information
Get more info on 'Thornton Wilder'.
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