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Thornton (Niven) Wilder (1897-1975) | |
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American writer and playwright, best known for the Pulitzer Prize awarded play OUR TOWN (1938). Wilder's breakthrough novel was THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (1927), an examination of justice and altruism. The story focused on the fates of five travelers in the 18-century Peru, who happen to be crossing the finest bridge in the land when it breaks and throws them into the gulf below. A scholarly monk, Brother Juniper, interprets the story of each victim in an attempt to explain the working of divine providence. Surely, he argues, if there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in human life, it could be discovered mysteriously latent in the lives of those particular people. But his book being done the text is pronounced heretical and and both Juniper and his work are burned by the Inquisition. "But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." (from The Bridge of San Luis Rey) Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, as one of five children of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor, diplomat, and a strict Calvinist, and Isabella (Niven) Wilder. In 1906 the family moved to Hong Kong, where his father had been appointed American Consul General. After six months his mother returned with the children to the United States, but the family rejoined again in 1911 in Shanghai, where his father had been transferred. Wilder stayed in China for a year. In 1915 Wilder enrolled in Oberlin College, where he studied the Greek and Roman classics in translation. In 1917 the family moved to to New Haven, Connecticut, and Wilder entered Yale University. His first full-length play, THE TRUMPET SHALL SOUND, appeared in 1920 in the Yale Literary Magazine, but it was not produced until 1926. During WW I Wilder served for eight months in the Coast Artillery Corps as a corporal. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1920, and went to Rome, where he studied archaeology at the American Academy. While teaching French at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, Wilder continued to write. By 1926 he had received an M.A. degree in French literature from Princeton University. In the same year appeared his first novel, THE CABALA, a fantasy about American expatriates, and the American Laboratory Theater produced The Trumpet Shall Sound. Wilder's second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, appeared in 1927, and next year he resigned his position at Lawrenceville. From 1930 to 1937 he was a part-time lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, in 1935 he was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and in 1950-51 a professor of poetry at Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. THE WOMAN OF ANDROS (1930) reflected Wilder's understanding of the classics. In the character of Chrysis the author created his archetype of of the virtue of hope. The book was attacked by Michael Gold, proletarian author of the novel Jews Without Money, as the work of a 'Christian gentleman' that was irrelevant to the sufferings of the poor during the Depression. "Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy." (from The Bridge of San Luis Rey) HEAVEN'S MY DESTINATION (1935) was Wilder's first novel set in America and drew a satirical portrait of an evangelical fundamentalist traveling salesman. Wilder's play Our Town was inspired by Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (1925) and gained a huge success. It earned Wilder another Pulitzer. The story was set in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, and traced the childhood, courtship, marriage, and death of Emily Webb and George Gibbs. Although the subject matter was for Wilder unusually provincial, his themes were universal and the daily events in the lives of ordinary people became deeply touching. "A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's knot's tied in a mighty public way." (from Our Town) THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, a history of human race, inspired by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, premiered in 1942. It depicted five thousand years in the lives of George and Maggie Antrobus, a suburban New Jersey couple, who, with their children Gladys and Henry and their maid Sabina, struggle through flood, famine, ice, and war only to begin the series all over again. The play won Wilder his third Pulitzer Prize. It was produced with Tallulah Bankhead, Fredric March, and Florence Eldridge is the central roles. In an interview Wilder has said, that one of his central preoccupations throughout his work has been "the surprise of the guld between each tiny occasion of the daily life and the vast streches of time and place in which every individual plays his role." (from Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimton, 2000) Almost all of Wilder's novels were historical, but from Heaven's My Destination Wilder started to approach the America he knew. He believed that "there is no Golden Ages and no Dark Ages", but only "the ocean like monotony of the generations of men under the alterations of fair and foul weather". Early in WW II Wilder enlisted in the army. He eventually became a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and earned the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star. His responsibilities included the interrogation of prisoners and the preparation of reports for the Mediterranean Air Headquarters. In the 1940s he also wrote scenario for Alfred Hitchcock's film Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and a play, THE EMPORIUM, based on Franz Kafka's works. After his discharge Wilder managed to complete THE IDES OF MARCH (1948), a historical novel about Julius Caesar, with which he had been long struggling and which became his most experimental work. Ceasar in a man who lives for his public responsibilities, but there is no love in his life, and he is cut off from humanity. In the 1950s Wilder wrote among others such plays as THE WRECK OF THE 5:25 (1957), BERNICE (1957), and ALCESTIAD, based on Euripide's Alcestis, and played at the Edinburgh Festival under the title of Life in the Sun. THE MERCHANT OF YOUNKERS (1938) was revised under the new title of THE MATCHMAKER (1954). In 1964 the musical comedy Hello, Dolly!, based on the play, was opened in New York, with Carol Channing in the leading role. "I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessary a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is underwater." (from Playwrights at Work) In 1962 Wilder received the first National Medal for Literature at a special White House ceremony. His last two novels were THE EIGHTH DAY (1967), which moved back and forth through the 20th century, and told a story about a talented inventor accused of murder, and THEOPHILUS NORTH (1973), a story about a sensitive young man and his nine possible careers. Wilder died on December 7, 1975, Hamden, Connecticut, where he had lived off and on for many years with his devoted sister, secretary, business manager, and literary adviser, Isabel Wilder. Wilder had one or two affairs with younger men, but his idea of love was not based on the cult of pleasure or solely on the relations of a couple, but on "the urge that strives toward justifying life, harmonizing, - the source of energy on which life must draw in order to better itself." Wilder, whose glasses concealed his cold, light blue eyes, was famous for his sociability and energy. His counteless friends included Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Montgomery Clift, he was interested in James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. "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." (from The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942) For further reading: Thornton Wilder by R. Burbank (1961); Thornton Wilder by B. Grebanier (1964); The Art of Thornton Wilder by M. Goldstein (1965); Thornton Wilder by M.C. Kuner (1972); Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait by R.H. Goldstone (1975); Thornton Wilder by L. Simon (1979); Thornton Wilder and His Public by A.N. Wilder (1980); The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder by G.A. Harrison (1983); Thornton Wilder by D. Castronovo (1986); Critical Essays on Thornton Wilder, ed. by Martin Blank (1995); Thornton Wilder: New Essays, ed. by Martin Blank (1999); Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimton (2000) Selected works:
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