Thornton Wilder was an American playwright and novelist who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his works, including The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town. He came from an intellectual family and attended Yale and Princeton. His most famous play, Our Town, is a meta play set in rural New Hampshire. His novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, deals with a random disaster and has seen a recent resurgence in popularity.
Thornton Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He was born in 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin and died in 1975 at the age of 78. During his lifetime he published seven novels and more than ten plays, including a series of one-act plays. Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzer Prizes in his lifetime, one for his novel The Bridge of the San Luis Ray and two for his plays, Our City and The Skin on Our Teeth.
Thornton Wilder came from an intellectual family. His father was a diplomat for the United States and the family spent some time in China during his early years. His older brother, Amos Wilder, was a poet of some renown, and his sister Charlotte Wilder was also a widely published poet. Thornton Wilder attended Berkeley High School and later earned a BA from Yale and an MA from Princeton.
After Princeton, Thornton Wilder began publishing his writing. He published his first novel, La Cabala in 1926. The following year, his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Around the same time, in the late 1920s, he also began writing plays. His most famous play, Our Town, was performed in 1938 and earned him his second Pulitzer Prize. Four years later, The Skin of Our Teeth earned him a third.
Some other notable works by Thornton Wilder include the novels Heaven’s My Destination and Ides of March, as well as the plays The Merchant of Yonkers, The Matchmaker and The Long Christmas Dinner. Thornton Wilder published somewhat infrequently, sometimes with a decade or more passing between published works, but his novels and plays by him were always met with great acclaim.
Her first novel, The Bridge at San Luis Rey has seen a recent resurgence in popularity, as Prime Minister Tony Blair mentioned it in a speech after September 11, 2001. The novel deals with a random disaster, a collapse of a bridge, which kills a number of people. It is seen by many as the forerunner of the disaster epic and is known for its device of taking a number of unrelated people and tying their lives together through a central, chance event.
Our Town is undoubtedly Thornton Wilder’s most popular play. It takes place in rural New Hampshire, in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners. In its three acts, a narrating character, the Stage Manager, chronicles life in the town of Grover’s Corners for more than a decade. The game is interesting in its use of meta devices, with the entire game being a game within a game. Through a simple set and relatively stiff dialogue, the play, like much of Thornton Wilder’s writing, shows how fundamentally universal human experience is. Our Town remains a popular play in the United States, and was made into a film in 1940 and again in 2003. It was also adapted into an opera in 2006.
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