Thornton Wilder

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Wilder, Thornton [Niven] (1897–1975), playwright. The popular, broad‐ranging writer was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Yale and Princeton. He had won fame for his excellent novels (especially the popular The Bridge of San Luis Rey) before writing some notable one‐act plays such as The Long Christmas Dinner and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. Although an earlier full‐length play, The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), dealing with a Christ‐like figure in New York, was a failure, as were several later long plays, three of his full‐length works are among the most interesting in the modern American theatre: the small‐town drama Our Town (1938), the expressionistic The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), and the merry farce The Matchmaker (1954), a rewriting of his earlier The Merchant of Yonkers (1938). He also wrote a 1932 translation of Lucrèce for Katharine Cornell and in 1937 made an adaptation of A Doll's House for Ruth Gordon. Despite the diversity of themes and forms, his best plays all offered thoughtful, perceptive views of essentially ordinary people and seem to grow richer over time. Biography: Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait, Richard H. Goldstone, 1975.

Novelist and playwright Thornton Niven Wilder (1897-1975) won two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays "Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth", written in 1938 and 1942 respectively. His most renowned novel, "The Bridge of San Luis Rey", also accorded him a Pulitzer Prize in 1927.

Born April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, Thornton Niven Wilder lived in China as a teenager where his father was a United States Consul-General in Hong Kong. He attended the English China Inland Mission School at Cheefoo but returned to California in 1912. Graduating in 1915, he attended Oberlin College before transferring to Yale University in 1917. He served with the First Coast Artillery in Rhode Island in 1918 during World War I, returning to Yale after the war. In 1920 he received his bachelor's and saw the first publication of his play The Trumpet Shall Sound in Yale Literary Magazine.

Wilder began his novel The Cabala at the American Academy in Rome in 1921. In New Jersey he taught at the Lawrenceville School while earning a master's at Princeton University. He received his degree in 1926, the publication year of The Cabala. Its publication coincided with the first professional production of The Trumpet Shall Sound by the American Laboratory Theater. But his breakthrough work was The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) that thrust him to the forefront of American literature.

A cosmopolitan lifelong traveler, he later taught at the University of Chicago (1930-1936) and the University of Hawaii (1935). He volunteered in World War II and served in Africa, Italy, and the United States. A lecturer at Harvard in the early 1950s, he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1952. In 1962 he retired to Arizona for almost two years, then renewed his travels. Wilder was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and the National Book Committee's National Medal for Literature (first time presented) in 1965.

Career as a Playwright

Wilder's first successful dramatic work, which he started at Oberlin, was The Angel That Troubled the Waters (1928). A four-act play, The Trumpet Shall Sound (1919-1920), was produced unsuccessfully off-Broadway in 1926. The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One-Act, published in 1931, contained three plays that gained popularity with amateur groups: The Long Christmas Dinner, Pullman Car Hiawatha, and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. This last series marked Wilder's trademark use of a bare stage for the actors.

Wilder's first Broadway shows were translations: André Obey's Lucrece (1932) and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1937). His dramatic reputation soared with Our Town (1938). Written for a bare stage, guided throughout by a narrator, his script examines a small town for the "something way down deep that's eternal about every human being."

His subsequent dramatic work, The Merchant of Yonkers, failed initially in 1938. When produced with slight revisions as The Matchmaker in 1954, it proved a fascinating farce. (It later re-emerged as the musical play Hello, Dolly! in 1963, then an overwhelming success.) Wilder intermingled style and forms even more daringly in The Skin of Our Teeth. Here, Wilder described the human race as flawed but worth preserving. A complex and difficult play with an indebtedness to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, it became the work cited for his final Pulitzer Prize in 1943.

The essentially conservative thematic material staged in radical styles made Wilder's plays unique. His later work included an unsuccessful tragedy, A Life in the Sun (or The Alcestiad, 1955) and three short plays of an intended 14-play cycle: Someone from Assisi, Infancy, and Childhood (produced as Plays for Bleecker Street in 1962).

Career as a Novelist

Wilder established his reputation as a novelist with The Cabala, a minor work that showed Wilder's moral concerns. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, set in 18th-century Peru, proved immensely popular and led to the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. The Woman of Andros (1930), based on Terence's play Andria and set in a pagan and Christian epoch, was not well received. Although Wilder's view of life elicited a strong communist attack, Heaven's My Destination (1934), set in the American Midwest, grew in favor over the years. In The Ides of March (1948) Wilder tried a novel approach to Julius Caesar. The Eighth Day in 1967 returned Wilder to a 20th-century American setting that examined the lives of two families. Wilder's last novel, Theophilus North, was published in 1973.

In line with his diverse interests and scholarly bent, Wilder lectured and published extensively. His Harvard lectures "Toward an American Language," "The American Loneliness," and "Emily Dickinson" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (1952). His topics addressed play writing, fiction, and the role of the artist in society. His range spanned from the works of the ancient Greeks to modern dramatists, particularly Joyce and Gertrude Stein. His observations and letters were published in a variety of works, from André Maurois's A Private Universe (1932) to Donald Gallup's The Flowers of Friendship (1953).

Wilder died of a heart attack December 7, 1975, in Hamden, Connecticut.

Further Reading

Biographical details appear most cohesively in Malcolm Goldstein's perceptive study, The Art of Thornton Wilder (1965). Other critical works include Rex Burbank, Thornton Wilder (1961); Bernard Grebanier, Thornton Wilder (1964); Donald Haberman, The Plays of Thornton Wilder: A Critical Study (1967), useful as an interesting source book; and Helmut Papajewski, Thornton Wilder, translated by John Conway (1968). For more information, please see David Castronovo, Thornton Wilder (1986); Richard Henry Goldstone, Thornton Wilder, an annotated bibliography (1982); Idy Martouskie, Thornton Wilder, 1897-1975 (videotape, 1993); Theophius North, Thornton Wilder, 1897-1975 (1975). Other works include The Journals of Thornton Wilder: With Two Scenes of an Uncompleted Play, "The Emporium" (1985), and Mirrors of Friendship: The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (1996).

(1897-1975)

1926	The Cabala. Wilder's first book is an ironic and urbane treatment of a group of Italian aristocrats in the aftermath of the Great War.
1927	The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder's first major success is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the working of fate that leads to the death of five people in a bridge collapse in Peru in 1714. The book sells more than 300,000 copies in its first two years, allowing Wilder to devote himself to writing full-time.
1928	The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays. Having seen his first play, The Trumpet Shall Sound, an allegory on God's forgiveness, produced in 1926, Wilder publishes this collection of short dramatic pieces, mostly with religious themes.
1930	The Woman of Andros. Based on the Latin comedy Andria by Terence, Wilder's third novel presents a philosophical fable about the emptiness of the classical world on the brink of profound changes ushered in by the birth of Christ.
1931	The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. Wilder's second collection gathers his first major dramas, including the title play, Pullman Car Hiawatha, and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, showing the experimental techniques with which he would be associated.
1935	Heaven's My Destination. First published in England in 1934, Wilder's picaresque satire covers the misadventures of an idealistic dreamer who tries to live in the Midwest during the Depression according to the philosophies of Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. It is regarded by many as the writer's finest achievement in fiction.
1938	Our Town. Wilder's innovative depiction of small-town American life in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, at the turn of the century uses a bare stage and employs a Stage Manager as narrator. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the play, one of the most popular and frequently performed American dramas, establishes Wilder as a distinctive voice in the American theater.
1942	The Skin of Our Teeth. For his allegorical drama reflecting the history of mankind in the experiences of the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey, Wilder draws on traditional domestic comedy, movie slapstick, and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake for inspiration. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the play has established itself as one of the most popular, innovative, and acclaimed American dramas.
1948	The Ides of March. In an experimental approach, Wilder depicts the events leading up to Julius Caesar's assassination in a series of imaginary documents and perspectives.
1954	The Matchmaker. Wilder's comedy is a revision of his 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers, treating the marital machinations of Dolly Levi. It would be the basis for the 1962 smash musical Hello, Dolly!
1962	Plays for Bleecker Street. Wilder collects three one-act plays, part of an unfinished fourteen-play cycle on the Seven Ages of Man and the Seven Deadly Sins.
1967	The Eighth Day. In his first novel since 1948, Wilder attempts his longest and most complex narrative, the story of two early-twentieth-century Illinois families animated by a murder trial. The novel wins the National Book Award.
1973	Theophilus North. Wilder's final book portrays a tutor in Newport, Rhode Island, during the 1920s. He explores various career paths that eventually lead to his becoming a writer.

Quotes:

"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate -- that's my philosophy."

"The best thing about animals is they don't talk much."

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."

"The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so."

"Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder."

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

See more famous quotes by Thornton Wilder

• Born: Apr 17, 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin
• Died: 1975 in Hamden, Connecticut
• Occupation: Writer
• Active: '40s-'50s, '80s, 2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Theater
• Career Highlights: Shadow of a Doubt, Mr. North, Our Town
• First Major Screen Credit: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929)

Biography

Thornton Wilder is best remembered for his play Our Town, which has been filmed once and presented numerous times on television, as well as being a staple of high school, college, semiprofessional, and regional theater companies' repertories throughout the many decades since its inception in 1938. He was also responsible for authoring the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and for co-writing the script for one of Alfred Hitchcock's most enduring thrillers. Born Thornton Niven Wilder in Madison, WI, in 1897, he was the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor and diplomat, and the former Isabella Thornton Niven. He was raised in Madison in his early years, but when he was nine, his father received an appointment as consul general in Hong Kong, where the family resided for part of that year. His mother, however, was wary of the political violence sweeping China and she and the children returned to America; the family went back to Hong Kong in 1910, following the cessation of the turmoil. He was educated at the Kaiser Wilhelm School and the China Inland Missionary Boys' School, before returning with his family to America in 1913, at the end of his father's appointment. Wilder spent the remainder of his youth in Berkeley, CA, attending Berkeley High School, where his interests in theater and playwriting first manifested themselves. He studied next at Oberlin College and Yale University, earning his B.A. in 1920, along with accolades from his professors for his potential as a writer. At his father's behest, he initially studied archeology in Rome, and then taught French at Lawrenceville, a boys' preparatory school in New Jersey.

Over the next several years, Wilder taught, traveled a bit (including a visit to New Hampshire that would later prove extremely important), and also wrote his first novel, The Cabala, inspired by his summer in Rome. Published in 1926, the book was reviewed enthusiastically, though it was hardly a bestseller, but it encouraged him to continue writing, and in 1927, he published his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book, a story set in the 18th century and dealing with issues of faith, tolerance, and love, all confronted through the prism of a seemingly random instance of cruel fate, was received with universal enthusiasm by critics and the public, winning the Pulitzer Prize and instantly earning a permanent place on high school and college reading lists for decades to come. A film adaptation followed in 1929, produced by MGM, and the story was adapted to the screen in 1944, from independent producer Benedict Bogeaus and director Rowland V. Lee. The earlier film was an awkward partial talkie, done during the transition to sound, while the 1940s version is usually regarded as an unsatisfactory film in most respects and has been seen very seldom on television since the 1960s. Wilder resigned his post at Lawrenceville in 1928, accepting an appointment to teach at the University of Chicago that was extended by an Oberlin classmate who was then the institution's president. In 1928, Wilder published a new book, The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, a volume of writing dating back to his days at Oberlin, which was more of a publication of a sketchbook of ideas than a representation of his current work. His 1930 novel The Woman of Andros, set in ancient Greece and dealing with the conflict between pagan and Christian morality, was reviewed unevenly, declared a masterpiece by some critics and a failure by others, who couldn't respond to its setting or characters.

It was five years before Wilder published another novel, but that book, Heaven's My Destination, was a deep and moving reflection of his vision of life and the best ways to live it in Depression-era America, told from the point of view of an itinerant salesman of religious books and the people he meets and interacts with. In 1938, Wilder published the work for which he is best known, the play Our Town. Set in Grovers Corners -- which was modeled after Petersborough, NH, which he had visited in 1924 -- the play told of the cycles of life, small and large, intimate and cosmic, from the point-of-view of two families, the Gibbs and the Webbs. The play was Wilder's second great success, winning a Pulitzer Prize and immediately getting taken up by companies all over the country. The film rights were purchased by producer Sol Lesser, who brought the play to the screen in 1940 under the direction of Sam Wood. It was criticized for altering the ending, making Emily's death a dream, a change that Wilder himself had insisted upon, in close consultation with the producer, because of his recognition that a movie of Our Town was fundamentally different from a play. The movie, which starred Martha Scott and a young William Holden, and featured production design by William Cameron Menzies and a widely acclaimed score by Aaron Copland, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and has continued to be highly regarded over the decades since. Wilder's next play, The Merchant of Yonkers (1939), was less than a success in its original form, although he later reworked it under the title of The Matchmaker, which was filmed under that title and later transformed into the musical Hello, Dolly!, which became one of the longest running shows on Broadway up to that time.

Wilder himself exerted his greatest direct influence on movies at the end of the 1930s and the outset of the 1940s. His reputation was so substantial in 1940 that Hollywood was eager for any input that he could provide and that they could afford. That year, he was given the task of adapting a short story entitled Uncle Charlie, written by Gordon McDonell, into a screen treatment. What Wilder delivered, with dialogue by Sally Benson, became the script for Shadow of a Doubt, which is regarded by most critics as Alfred Hitchcock's first seriously penetrating American thriller. That film and its setting was almost a macabre inversion of the small-town Americana of Wilder's Our Town, a Norman Rockwell vision with fangs and psychosis added. Wilder's next play, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), was inspired by the events surrounding the American entry into the Second World War. A daring attempt to interweave the history of humankind from prehistoric times to the conflict at hand, it earned Wilder his third Pulitzer Prize. He returned to writing fiction after World War II with The Ides of March, by which time he was one of the most renowned authors in the world. His later works, which included novels and plays, were somewhat anticlimactic compared with his three successes of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.

Our Town remained as popular in the 1950s as it had been in the late '30s and '40s, and in 1955, was even musicalized by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn in a television production starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint; Frank Sinatra played the Stage Manager, introducing the songs "Love and Marriage" and "The Impatient Years." The Matchmaker was filmed in 1958, and eventually turned into Hello, Dolly!, the stage version of which was breaking box-office records for most of the 1960s. Collections of his plays were interspersed with new works, among them the play The Alcestiad (1977) and the novels The Eighth Day (1967) and Theophilus North (written in 1973, and filmed as Mr. North in 1988). The latter was as close to an autobiographical work as Wilder ever came, dealing with a character who had lived in China and attended Yale, as well as having a summer in Rome behind him. Wilder passed away in 1975 at the age of 78, by which time his work had become part of the intellectual and cultural landscape of the United States.

It was after his death that Wilder became somewhat controversial, both personally and professionally, in a most unexpected way, amid the odd flow of ideological currents running through American life. The emergence of the aggressive gay rights movement during the mid-'70s, coupled with the lingering drug use and freer overall sexual mores of the 1960s, along with the presidential battle between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford (representing reactionary and conservative wings of the Republican Party, respectively), and the ascent of Jimmy Carter to the presidency, had all served to inflame the reactionary right. The latter, focused through newly combative religious reactionaries, began aiming at targets across society, including school reading lists -- Our Town, with its mystical overtones, became a subject of controversy all by itself. Additionally, as these same forces took the battle specifically over gay rights to ever more absurd levels, the gay community and its supporters fired back by pointing out all of the known homosexuals whose writings were standard to most high schools and colleges. Thornton Wilder was one name that figured prominently in those arguments. Ironically, the author had never publicly addressed his sexuality, and the general subject of sexuality was largely absent from his writing. As the political right was often culturally obtuse, it came as something of a shock to many leaders and adherents that an author whose writing permeated school reading lists to the degree that Wilder did, or who was as closely associated with an idealized Americana, could have been homosexual. Overall, the controversy probably had no net effect -- Our Town was likely removed from schools in some very conservative districts (which was unfortunate for those students), but the dispute probably gave it a new level of interest in the many locales where it was still used without protest. The play remains one of the most well known ever written, sufficiently so that it was capable of being used as the key plot element of a 1989 episode of the popular sitcom Cheers entitled "Two Girls For Every Boyd," with no concern that audiences would not recognize it. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Our Town Buy this Movie	Mr. North Buy this Movie	The Skin of Our Teeth Buy this Movie	Our Town Buy this Movie
The Matchmaker Buy this Movie	The Bridge of San Luis Rey Buy this Movie	Shadow of a Doubt Buy this Movie	Our Town Buy this Movie

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