Thornton Wilder

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.

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.

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.

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.

He earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926.

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).

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".

He resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928.

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.

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 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.