Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder (1897/04/17 - 1975/12/07) was an American playwright and novelist. He is the only writer to ever win Pulitzer Prize for Novel and Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). His most renowned novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), also accorded him a Pulitzer Prize for Novels in 1927. He also won National Book Award for Fiction in 1968 for The eighth day .

Born April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin as Thornton Niven Wilder, Wilder was the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Niven Wilder. He 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.

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, 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.

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 (1931), Pullman Car Hiawatha (1931), and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden (1931). 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).

Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired, asked him to write the screenplay to his thriller, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

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. He died in Hamden, Connecticut, where he lived for many years with his sister, Isabel. He was interred at Hamden's Mount Carmel Cemetery.