Quotations
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
New York Journal-American (11 November 1955)
It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
TIME magazine (3 February 1958)
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
More Quotes >>
Encyclopedia
Thornton Wilder was an
American playwright and
novelist.
Life
Family
Thornton Niven Wilder was born 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 and Janet Wilder Dakin , attended
Mount Holyoke College and were excellent students. Thornton 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 is a three act play by Thornton Wilder [i] that is set in the fictional community of Grover ...
and
The Skin of Our Teeth is a Pulitzer Prize for Drama [i]-winning play [i] by Thornton Wilder [i] ...
.
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 had a wide circle of friends and enjoyed mingling with other famous 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 generally acknowledged 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 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 is a three act play by Thornton Wilder [i] that is set in the fictional community of Grover ...
, a popular play 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. 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 is a Pulitzer Prize for Drama [i]-winning play [i] by Thornton Wilder [i] ...
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 history of mankind.
The Matchmaker is a play [i] by Thornton Wilder [i] based on an 1842 [i] play by the Austrian [i] ...
, a farcical play based on
Austrian playwright
Johann Nestroy's
Einen Jux will er sich machen , 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
- The Cabala
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
- The Woman of Andros
- Heaven's My Destination
- Ides of March
- The Eighth Day
- Theophilus North
Plays
- The Trumpet Shall Sound
- An Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays
- The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act which includes
- 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 is a three act play by Thornton Wilder [i] that is set in the fictional community of Grover ...
- The Merchant of Yonkers
- The Skin of Our Teeth is a Pulitzer Prize for Drama [i]-winning play [i] by Thornton Wilder [i] ...
- The Matchmaker is a play [i] by Thornton Wilder [i] based on an 1842 [i] play by the Austrian [i] ...
- Childhood
- Infancy
- Plays for Bleecker Street
- The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Volume I which includes
- The Long Christmas Dinner
- Qeens 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
References
External links
