"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." -- Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 — December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.
"A play visibly represents pure existing.""An incinerator is a writer's best friend.""But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.""Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.""For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?""Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.""I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.""I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.""I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.""If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.""In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.""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.""It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.""Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.""Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.""Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.""Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.""Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.""Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.""My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.""Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.""Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.""Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.""Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success.""Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.""The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.""The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.""The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.""The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'""There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.""There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.""Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.""We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.""We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.""When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.""When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home."
Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, 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 because of their father's work.
Thornton Wilder's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, was Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, a noted poet, and foundational to the development of the field theopoetics. Amos was also a nationally ranked tennis player who competed at the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1922. His youngest sister, Isabel Wilder, was an accomplished writer. Both of his other sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist, attended Mount Holyoke College and were excellent students. Additionally, Wilder had a sister and a twin brother, who died at birth.
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 also attended Creekside Middle School in Berkeley, and graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915. Wilder also studied law for two years before dropping out of Purdue University.
After serving in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War I, he attended Oberlin College before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree 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 Masters of Art degree in French from Princeton University in 1926.
After graduating, Wilder studied in Rome, Italy, and then taught French at the 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 the 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 U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. 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.
Wilder translated plays by André Obey and Jean-Paul Sartre, and wrote the libretti to two operas, The Long Christmas Dinner, composed by Paul Hindemith, and The Alcestiad, composed by Louise Talma's and based on his own play. Also, Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired, asked him to write the screenplay to his thriller, Shadow of a Doubt.
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 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, a popular play (and later film) 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. Wilder suffered from severe 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, Wilder 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 just 39 performances.
His play The Skin of Our Teeth opened in New York on November 18, 1942, with Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead in the leading 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 alternate history of mankind. It was claimed by Joseph Campbell and Robert Morton Robinson, authors of A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's 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), dedicated to an anti-fascist Italian writer, Lauro de Bosis, he reflected on parallels between Benito Mussolini and Caesar. He had met Jean-Paul Sartre on a U.S. lecture tour after the war, and was under the influence of existentialism, rejecting its atheist implications.
In 1955, Tyrone Guthrie encouraged Wilder to rework The Merchant of Yonkers into The Matchmaker. This time the play enjoyed a healthy Broadway run of 486 performances with Ruth Gordon in the title role, winning a Tony Award for Guthrie, its director. It later became the basis for the hit 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!, with a book by Michael Stewart and score by Jerry Herman.
In 1962, he lived temporarily in the small town of Douglas, Arizona, where he started to write his longest novel The Eighth Day. The book went on to win the National Book Award.
His last novel, Theophilus North, was published in 1973, and made into the film Mr. North in 1988. The Library of America republished the first five novels, six early stories, and four essays on fiction in one volume in 2009. Later novels are to be in a forthcoming volume.
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, Switzerland, 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.
Death
He died on December 7, 1975, age 78, in Hamden, Connecticut, where he lived for many years with his sister Isabel. He was interred at Hamden's Mount Carmel Cemetery.
