Thornton Wilder

American · 1897 to 1975

Born Thornton Niven Wilder on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, he was the son of a newspaper editor who later served as American consul general, a posting that carried the family to Hong Kong and Shanghai. He had a twin brother who died at birth, and he attended schools in China and California before studying at Oberlin and then Yale, where he graduated in 1920. He spent a year in Rome at the American Academy, an experience that fed his first novel, The Cabala (1926). He taught French at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey while writing in the evenings, and his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), about five travelers killed when a Peruvian rope bridge collapses, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and made him famous at thirty. He won the Pulitzer twice more, for the plays Our Town (1938), set in the fictional village of Grover's Corners and performed on a bare stage with a Stage Manager narrating directly to the audience, and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). His farce The Matchmaker (1955) was later adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly! During the Second World War he served in Army Air Force intelligence, rising to lieutenant colonel. He never married and lived for decades with his sister Isabel in Hamden, Connecticut. He read voraciously in several languages, corresponded with Gertrude Stein and Sigmund Freud, and worked on the screenplay for Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943). His last novel, Theophilus North, appeared in 1973. He died of a heart attack on December 7, 1975, at his home in Hamden, at the age of seventy-eight.