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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). Thornton Wilder's breakthrough
novel was The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1927), an examination of justice and altruism. Deeply learned in Latin
and Greek literature, Wilder integrated modernist techniques with the
classical tradition. "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." (The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder, illustrated by Amy Drevenstedt, Grosset & Dunlap Publishers by arrangement with Albert and Charles Boni, 1927, pp. 234-235), Thornton
Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, one of five
children
of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor, diplomat, and a strict
Calvinist, and Isabella (Niven) Wilder, the daughter of a Presbyterian
minister. Embracing the Puritan heritage of his family, Wilder said
later that his father was the personification of
the tradition. Though only Thornton gained fame, all five Wilder
children became published writers. However, Amos Wilder believed that
his son was headed for failure. "Poor Thornton, poor Thornton . . .
he'll be a burden all his life," he said. (Thornton Wilder: His World by Linda Simon, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1979, p. p. 28) In 1906 the family moved to Hong Kong, where his father had
been
appointed American Consul General. At that time the salary given a
diplomat was very small and after six months Wilder's mother
returned with her four children to the United States. The family
rejoined again in 1911 in Shanghai, where Amos Parker Wilder had been
transferred. Wilder studied at the China Inland Mission Boys' School in
Chefoo (modern Yantai), 450 miles from Shanghai. In 1915 Wilder entered
Oberlin
College, where he studied the Greek and Roman classics in translation.
His marks were were at times only averege or less, while in Chefoo he
read on his own Horace's Odes,
Vergil's Aeneid, and Ovid in
the original Latin. To his literary efforts from this period Wilder
once referred as "aesthetic missionary work." (Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative
Tradition by Lincoln Konkle, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006, p. 58) The family moved in 1917 to to New Haven, Connecticut, and
Wilder
entered Yale University. His first full-length play, The Trumpet Shall Sound
(1920) appeared in the Yale Literary Magazine,
but it was not
produced until 1926 by the American Laboratory Theater in New York. The
title of the play refers to apotle Paul's prophecy of the
resurrection of the dead: "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at
the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be
raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." (I Corinthians 15:52 NKJV) 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.
Upon arriving Paris in June 1921, he stayed at Hôtel du Maroc, but
tired of the bedbugs he moved to a pension (now the Franco-Vietnam
Institute) on the rue Saint-Jacques. He remained there the rest of the
summer. When Wilder returned to Paris in 1926, he wrote at this pension
much of The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
It was published shortly after his return to New York at the end of
January 1927. 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 a young American visiting Rome, where he meets a group of Italian aristocrats, who turn out to be incarnations of the ancient Roman gods. Although Wilder had set the events of The Bridge of San Luis Rey in Peru, it was not until 1941, when he visited the country. 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. With the success of this 34,000 word novella, Wilder could afford to resign his position at Lawrenceville. From 1930 to 1937 Wilder 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. "I think of 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." ('Thornton Wilder (1956),' in Playwrights at Work: The Paris Review, edited by George Plimton, New York: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 22) The Woman of Andros
(1930) takes place in ancient Greece. Partly based on a comedy of
Terence,
it reflected Wilder's deep immersion in the world of the classics.
Wilder
once stated, that "I am not one of the new dramatists we are looking
for. I wish I were. I hope I have played a part in preparing the way to
them. I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of
forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive brick-a-brack." ('Preface,' in Three Plays: On Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder, New York: Avon Books, 1957, p. xii) In the
character of Chrysis the author created his archetype of the virtue of
hope. Almost all of Wilder's early works were historical, but from Heaven's My Destination Wilder began to approach the modern day America, partly as a result of a nationwide "Gold-Wilder controversy," that contunued several years. Edmund Wilson, editor of The New Republic, had asked Michael Gold, the author of Jews Without Money (1930), to review Wilder's novels. He had never read anything by Wilder. Gold was described as "the country's leading and most provocative proponent of proletarian art." Gold dismissed Wilder's world as a "historic junkshop," where in the "devitalized air move the wan ghosts he has called up, each in "romantic" costume." ('Wilder: Propher of the Genteel Christ,' The New Republic, October 22, 1930) Heaven's My Destination (1935), Wilder's first novel set in America, 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. Each act is introduced by the Stage Manager in a direct address to the audience; the first act takes place on 7 May, 1901. Although the subject matter, the lives of ordinary people in an average town, was for Wilder unusually provincial, the themes of the acts – Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death – were universal. The Skin of Our Teeth,
a history of human race, was inspired by James
Joyce's Finnegans Wake. 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
directed by Elia Kazan, with Tallulah Bankhead, Fredric March, and
Florence Eldridge in the central roles. Montgomery Clift made an impact
as Henry, a neurotic yet innocent son. When the production opened on
Broadway at the Plymouth Theater on November 18, 1942, it received
great critial acclaim. The Times's
Lewis Nichols called it "the best pure theater of the forties".
Referring to Wilder's Midwestern background, Stella Adler once
said of the stage version that "nothing could be less puritanical than
his Skin of Our Teeth burlesque." ('Thornton Wilder
(1897-1975),' in Stella Adler on
America's Master Playwrights by Stella Adler, edited and with commentary by Barry Paris, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, p. 87)
Leonard
Bernstein worked with the songwriting/playwright team Betty Comden and
Adolph Green on a musical version of the play most of the summer and
late autumn of 1964. A tentative opening date had been set for
September 1965, but never explaining why Bernstein eventually abandoned
the project. Wilder, whose glasses concealed his cold, light blue eyes, was
famous for his sociability and energy. His counteless friends included
Gertrude Stein, whom he met in 1934 in Chicago, Hemingway, Willa
Cather, and Montgomery Clift, who frequently spent Sundays in Hamden at
house of Wilder and his sister Isabel; he was interested in James
Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. In an interview Wilder has said,
that one of his central preoccupations throughout his work has been
"the surprise of the gulf between each tiny occasion of the daily life
and the vast stretches of time and place in which every individual plays
his role." (Playwrights
at Work, p. 16) Along with John Dos Passos, Wilder served as U.S.
Representative at
PEN writers conference in London in 1941. In the same year Wilder was sent by
the U.S. State Department on South American goodwill tour. His fellow
passenger on the Grace Line's Santa Lucia, Sherwood Anderson,
became seriously ill during the voyage and died at Christobal, at the
end of the Panama Chanal. When the war broke out, Wilder enlisted in Army Air Force as intelligence officer. He served in North Africa and Italy. From 1942 to 1945 he wrote little. His responsibilities included the interrogation of prisoners and the preparation of reports for the Mediterranean Air Headquarters. Wilderearned the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. In the 1940s Wilder worked on the scenario for Alfred Hitchcock's film Shadow of a Doubt (1943), set in the small town of Santa Rosa, and began a play, The Emporium, based on Franz Kafka's works – it was specially meant for Montgomery Clift, who promised that he would play it anywhere, any place. After his discharge from the army, Wilder completed The Ides of March (1948), an experimental historical novel about Julius Caesar, with which he had been long struggling. Basically Wilder's plays reflect his optimistic
belief in
humanity, although his later works are darker in tone. The author
himself never had the experience of living "a normal family life". His oldest sister
Charlotte, a poet in her own right, was hospitalized for mental illness
several times – she suffered from obsessive
complexes and she was convinced that communists were after her. In 1947 she underwent a frontal
lobotomy. (Mosaic of Fire: The Work
of Lola Ridge, Evelyn Scott, Charlotte Wilder, and Kay Boyle by
Caroline Maun, Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2012)
However, this did not prevent her from forming a friendship with the
revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman. Wilder's mother died in 1946. To
his friends Wilder murmured that his
own life had been a failure. In the 1950s Wilder wrote The
Wreck of the 5:25 (1957),
Bernice (1957), and Alcestiad,
based on Euripide's Alcestis, and performed at the Edinburgh
Festival under the title of Life in the Sun. When Montgomery
Clift criticized its dialogue as forced and pedantic, Wilder became
according to the actor so enraged, that "he almost jumped into the
Atlantic Ocean." (Montgomery Clift: A Biography by Patricia Bosworth, Toronto, New York, London, Sydney: Bantam Books, p. 287) The Merchant of Younkers (1938), a farce based on a British play called A Day Well Spent (1835) by John Oxenford and Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich Macher (1842), failed critically and commercially. Wilder revised it under the new title of The Matchmaker (1954). Later this play inspired the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly!, which opened in 1964 in New York, starring Carol Channing and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman. 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), about a sensitive young man and his nine possible careers. It has been suggested that Wilder was denied the Nobel Prize because he was – wrongly – accused in 1942 by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson of plagiarizing The Skin of Our Teeth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This time Edmund Wilson came to Wilder's defense: "Joyce is a great quarry, out of which a variety of writers have been getting and will continue to get a variety of different things; and Wilder is a genuine poet with a form and imagination of his own who may find his themes where he pleases without incurring the charge of imitation." (quoted in Thornton Wilder by David Castronovo, New York: Ungar, 1986, p. 22) Thornton 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 never married; he had one or two affairs with younger men. For further reading: Thornton Wilder by Rex Burbank (1961); Thornton Wilder by Bernard Grebanier (1964); The Art of Thornton Wilder by Malcolm Goldstein (1965); Thornton Wilder: The Bright and The Dark by M.C. Kuner (1972); Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait by Richard H. Goldstone (1975); Thornton Wilder: His World by Linda Simon (1979); Thornton Wilder and His Public by Amos Niven Wilder (1980); The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder by Gilbert A. Harrison (1983); Thornton Wilder (Literature & Life) by David Castronovo (1986); Critical Essays on Thornton Wilder, edited by Martin Blank (1995); Thornton Wilder: New Essays, edited by Martin Blank (1999); 'Thornton Wilder,' in Playwrights at Work: The Paris Review, edited by George Plimton (2000); Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition by Lincoln Konkle (2006); 'Thornton Wilder (1897-1975),' in Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights by Stella Adler (2012); Thornton Wilder: A Life by Penelope Niven (2012); Modern American Drama. Playwriting in the 1940s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations by Felicia Hardison Londré (2017); Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century by Howard Sherman (2021); Thornton Wilder Encyclopedia by Thomas S. Hischak (2022); Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature by Stephen J. Rojcewicz, Jr. (2022) Selected works:
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