A short life of the author
Thornton Niven Wilder (17 April 1897 – 7 December 1975) was an American novelist and playwright who remains the only writer to have won the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and drama. His novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) won the Pulitzer for Fiction; his plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) each won the Pulitzer for Drama. His work is characterised by a philosophical ambition concealed beneath apparent simplicity — an insistence on asking the largest questions (Why do we live? Why do we die? What is the meaning of love?) through the smallest, most ordinary human material.
Life
Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin. His father, Amos Parker Wilder, was a newspaper editor who served as American consul-general in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and Thornton spent part of his childhood in China. He attended Oberlin College, then Yale, and after graduating studied archaeology at the American Academy in Rome — an experience that shaped the European and classical sensibility that distinguishes his work from most American writing of his era.
He taught at the University of Chicago for six years (1930–1936) and served in the Army Air Force during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was cosmopolitan, multilingual, and deeply learned — a friend of Gertrude Stein (who influenced his experimental techniques), a correspondent of Sigmund Freud, and an admirer of Kierkegaard, whose existentialism informs much of his later work.
He was a private man who never married. He spent his later years in Hamden, Connecticut, increasingly reclusive, working on a massive novel cycle (never completed) and on adaptations of European plays.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
On Friday noon, 20 July 1714, the finest bridge in Peru collapsed, plunging five travellers into the abyss. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar who witnessed the disaster, sets out to discover whether the victims’ deaths were accidental or providential — whether their lives, examined closely enough, would reveal a divine pattern.
The novel examines each victim’s life in turn, and the answer it provides is profoundly ambiguous: the lives reveal not providence but love — the connections between people that constitute whatever meaning human existence possesses. The final sentence — “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning” — is one of the most quoted in American literature.
The novel was an enormous bestseller, the first book chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club to reach truly massive sales. It made Wilder famous at thirty.
Our Town (1938)
Set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the play presents the daily life, love, marriage, and death of its ordinary inhabitants — the Gibbs and Webb families — with radical theatrical simplicity. There is no scenery; props are mimed; a Stage Manager narrates, comments, and moves between the world of the living and the dead.
The third act, in which Emily Webb returns from the dead to relive a single day of her life and discovers that the living do not appreciate what they have, is one of the most devastating scenes in American theatre. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?” Emily asks. “No,” the Stage Manager replies. “The saints and poets, maybe — they do some.”
Our Town is the most frequently performed American play. Its apparent simplicity is deceptive: Wilder drew on Gertrude Stein’s experiments with continuous present, on Chinese theatre’s use of bare stages, and on existentialist philosophy’s insistence on the urgency of the present moment.
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)
A play about the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey, who are simultaneously a modern suburban family and the entire human race — surviving the Ice Age, the Flood, and a world war through resourcefulness, stubbornness, and the books of the Western tradition. The play’s form — metatheatrical, anachronistic, constantly breaking its own illusion — anticipates postmodern drama by decades.
The Matchmaker (1954)
A farce about Dolly Gallagher Levi, a matchmaker in 1880s Yonkers, New York. The play was adapted by Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman into the musical Hello, Dolly! (1964), which became one of the biggest hits in Broadway history.
Novels
Wilder’s later novels deserve more attention than they receive. The Ides of March (1948) is an epistolary novel reconstructing the last days of Julius Caesar through imagined letters and documents. The Eighth Day (1967), which won the National Book Award, is a multigenerational saga set in a southern Illinois mining town. Theophilus North (1973), his last novel, is a genial picaresque set in 1920s Newport, Rhode Island.
Critical Standing
Wilder has always been difficult for critics to place. He was too experimental for the realists, too accessible for the avant-garde, too optimistic for the existentialists, and too European for the American literary establishment. Edmund Wilson praised him; Mary McCarthy attacked him.
His reputation is now secure. Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey are permanent fixtures of American culture, and scholars have increasingly recognised the formal sophistication beneath their apparent simplicity.
Collecting Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927, Albert & Charles Boni) in first edition with dust jacket brings $2,000–$6,000. Our Town (1938, Coward-McCann) firsts are $500–$1,500. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942, Harper) firsts are $200–$500. Wilder’s letters and manuscripts are held primarily at Yale’s Beinecke Library.