Thornton Wilder won Pulitzers for both fiction and drama, and called himself a teacher first
A bridge collapses in Peru and several strangers die. Thornton Wilder built a novel on asking why them, won a Pulitzer in 1928, and then collected two more for plays, Our Town among them. He also drafted a Hitchcock thriller and supplied the story behind Hello, Dolly!, yet insisted teaching came first.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1897, Wilder spent part of his childhood in China, where his father served as US Consul General in Hong Kong and Shanghai. A stillborn twin preceded a family of high achievers: his brother Amos became a Harvard divinity professor and a pioneer of theopoetics. Thornton was teased as a bookish outsider at the Thacher School in California and retreated to the library. After Yale and a spell at the American Academy in Rome, he taught French at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, from 1927, brought him commercial success, and its earnings paid for a family house built in 1930 in Hamden, Connecticut. Its architect, Alice Trythall Washburn, was among the rare women in that profession at the time. The novel's device of one catastrophe binding its victims, explored through flashbacks, made it an ancestor of the disaster epic, and Tony Blair read from it at a memorial after the September 11 attacks. Our Town, set in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, strips the stage bare and uses a Stage Manager as narrator; Wilder took that role himself on Broadway for two weeks.
Not everything landed. His Merchant of Yonkers, directed by Max Reinhardt in 1938, closed after 39 performances. Reworked at Tyrone Guthrie's urging as The Matchmaker, it ran 486 performances from 1955 with Ruth Gordon and later became the musical Hello, Dolly! The Skin of Our Teeth, opening in November 1942, drew claims from Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson that it borrowed heavily from Finnegans Wake. During World War II he rose to lieutenant colonel in Army Air Force intelligence.
Late honours included the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and a National Book Award for The Eighth Day, begun during 20 solitary months in Douglas, Arizona. He died in his Hamden house in December 1975, aged 78. His private life is disputed: Samuel Steward claimed an affair, but biographer Penelope Niven, working from letters, rejects Steward's story. An unfinished play, The Emporium, was completed by Kirk Lynn from Yale drafts and premiered in Houston in 2024.
Source: Thornton Wilder
