Thornton Wilder Popular Books

Thornton Wilder Biography & Facts

Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day. Early life and education Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor and later a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Thornton Niven.Wilder had four siblings as well as a twin who was stillborn. All of the surviving Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China when their father was stationed in Hong Kong and Shanghai as U.S. Consul General. Thornton's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, became Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. He was a noted poet and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. Their sister Isabel Wilder was an accomplished writer. They had two more sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist. 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 at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference." His family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 1910. He attended the English China Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai, but returned with his mother and siblings to California in 1912 because of the unstable political conditions in China at the time. Thornton graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915.Wilder served a three-month enlistment in the U.S. Army's Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams in Rhode Island during World War I, eventually rising to the rank of corporal. He attended Oberlin College before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920 at Yale University, where he refined his writing skills as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a literary society. He earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926. Career After graduating, Wilder went to Italy and studied archaeology and Italian (1920–21) as part of an eight-month residency at The American Academy in Rome, and then taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, beginning in 1921. His first novel, The Cabala, was published in 1926. In 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success and his first Pulitzer Prize (1928). He resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928. From 1930 to 1937 he taught at the University of Chicago, during which time he published his translation of André Obey's own adaptation of the tale "Le Viol de Lucrece" (1931) under the title "Lucrece" (Longmans Green, 1933). In Chicago, he became famous as a lecturer and was chronicled on the celebrity pages. In 1938 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Our Town, and he won the prize again in 1943 for his play The Skin of Our Teeth.World War II saw Wilder rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. He received several awards for his military service. He went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, 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 1968 he won the National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.Proficient in four languages, Wilder translated plays by André Obey and Jean-Paul Sartre. He wrote the libretti of two operas, The Long Christmas Dinner, composed by Paul Hindemith, and The Alcestiad, composed by Louise Talma and based on his own play. Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired, asked him to write the screenplay of his thriller Shadow of a Doubt, and he completed a first draft for the film.The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) 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 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 wrote Our Town, a popular play (and later film) set in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. It was inspired in part by Dante's Purgatorio and in part by his friend Gertrude Stein's novel The Making of Americans. Wilder suffered from writer's block while writing the final act. Our Town employs a choric narrator called the Stage Manager and a minimalist set to underscore the human experience. Wilder himself played the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in summer stock productions. Following the daily lives of the Gibbs and Webb families, as well as the other inhabitants of Grover's Corners, the play illustrates the importance of the universality of the simple, yet meaningful lives of all people in the world in order to demonstrate the value of appreciating life. The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize.In 1938, Max Reinhardt directed a Broadway production of The Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder had adapted from Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842). It was a failure, closing after 39 performances.His play The Skin of Our Teeth opened in New York on November 18, 1942, featuring Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead. 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 alternate history of mankind. It was claimed by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, authors of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, that much of the play was the result of unacknowledged borrowing from James Joyce's last work.In his novel The Ides of March (1948), Wilder reconstructed the characters and events leading to, and culminating in, the assassination of Julius Caesar. He had met Jean-Paul Sartre on a U.S. lecture tour after the war, and was under the influence of existentialism, although rejecting its atheist implications.In 1954, Tyrone Guthrie encouraged Wilder to rework The Merchant of Yonkers int.... Discover the Thornton Wilder popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Thornton Wilder books.

Best Seller Thornton Wilder Books of 2024

  • The Cabala and The Woman of Andros synopsis, comments

    The Cabala and The Woman of Andros

    Thornton Wilder

    “For much of the twentieth century, these remarkable early novels were hidden in the great shadow of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Now we can examine them in the spotlight for the gi...

  • The Thornton Wilder Encyclopedia synopsis, comments

    The Thornton Wilder Encyclopedia

    Thomas S. Hischak

    Thornton Wilder is one of America’s greatest writers, and the only author to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama. Equally well known for his plays and novels, his unique ...

  • Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature synopsis, comments

    Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature

    Stephen J. Rojcewicz, Jr.

    This book delineates how Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), a learned playwright and novelist, embeds himself within the classical tradition, integrating Greek and Roman motifs with a wi...

  • The Eighth Day synopsis, comments

    The Eighth Day

    Thornton Wilder

    “[Wilder's] finest and most beautiful novel. . . . Spanning two continents and several generations, it begins as a murder mystery and goes on to tell a story, at once dramatic and ...

  • Los Idus de Marzo synopsis, comments

    Los Idus de Marzo

    Thornton Wilder

    Publicada originalmente en un momento en que el paralelismo con Mussolini era evidente "Los Idus de Marzo" ha quedado a un tiempo como una de las mejores recreaciones de la vida de...

  • Secret Historian synopsis, comments

    Secret Historian

    Justin Spring

    2010 National Book Award Finalist for NonfictionDrawn from the secret, neverbeforeseen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel ...

  • The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II synopsis, comments

    The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II

    Thornton Wilder

    The publication of volume two of this landmark collection celebrates the close of the centennial year of Thornton Wilder's birth. This volume collects 17 plays from the author's th...

  • Study Guide to Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder synopsis, comments

    Study Guide to Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder

    Intelligent Education

    A comprehensive study guide offering indepth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Thornton Wilder, recognized as one of America's most respected contemporary wri...

  • Die Cabala synopsis, comments

    Die Cabala

    Thornton Wilder

    Thornton Wilders Roman ›Die Cabala‹ schildert die Begegnung eines jungen Amerikaners mit einem Kreis seltsamer junger Leute in Rom Menschen, die wie Götter leben. Dem nüchternen j...

  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey synopsis, comments

    The Bridge of San Luis Rey

    Thornton Wilder

    This Pulitzer Prizewinning, fablelike short novelby the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teethhas been beloved around the world for nearly a century.This splendid and profoun...

  • El Puente de San Luis Rey synopsis, comments

    El Puente de San Luis Rey

    Thornton Wilder

    La caída en julio de 1714 del "puente más lindo de todo el Perú" y la consecuente muerte de cinco viajeros, inducen a fray Junípero, fraile franciscano, a iniciar una inves...

  • Thornton Wilder synopsis, comments

    Thornton Wilder

    Penelope Niven

    "Thornton Wilder: A Life brings readers face to face with the extraordinary man who made words come alive around the world, on the stage and on the page." James Earl Jones, actor"C...

  • Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others synopsis, comments

    Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others

    Robert Gottlieb

    A new collection of immersive essays from the most acclaimed editor of the second half of the twentieth centuryThis new collection from the legendary editor Robert Gottlieb feature...

  • The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder synopsis, comments

    The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

    Thornton Wilder, Jackson R. Bryer & Robin Gibbs Wilder

    Spanning his entire life, The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder is a comprehensive and fascinating collection of the great American writer’s correspondence. The author of such cl...

  • The Matchmaker synopsis, comments

    The Matchmaker

    Thornton Wilder

    “Loud, slap dash and uproarious...extraordinarily original and funny."New York TimesNow, for the first time in a standalone edition, Thornton Wilder's brilliant, hilarious play whi...

  • Theophilus North synopsis, comments

    Theophilus North

    Thornton Wilder

    “An extremely entertaining array of American life in a bygone era.”  New YorkerThe last of Thornton Wilder’s works published during his lifetime, Theophilus North is part...

  • The Classic Collection of Thornton Wilder. Pulitzer Prize 1928 synopsis, comments

    The Classic Collection of Thornton Wilder. Pulitzer Prize 1928

    Thornton Wilder

    Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Ou...

  • The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume I synopsis, comments

    The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume I

    Thornton Wilder

    Thornton Wilder, author of such landmark works for the stage as Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth as well as the classic novel The Bridges of San Luis Rey is considered one of Ame...

  • The Ides of March synopsis, comments

    The Ides of March

    Thornton Wilder

    The classic Thornton Wilder novel that recreates the dazzling ancient Roman empire of Julius Caesarnow with a new introduction by Jeremy McCarter, author of You...