Thornton Nevin Wilder Letters, 1935-1940 | MS Manuscripts

Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975)

Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, 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. His family lived for a time in China. 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.

After having served a three-month enlistment in the Army's Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams, Rhode Island in World War I (rising to the rank of corporal), 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 Master of Arts 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 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 1968 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 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.