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Novelist and playwright Thornton Niven Wilder (1897-1975) won two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, written in 1938 and 1942 respectively. His most renowned novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, also accorded him a Pulitzer P...

Thornton Wilder, the only writer to receive Pulitzer Prizes for both plays and a novel, once observed, "I guess I was the only writer of my generation who didn't 'go to Paris!'" For him the road abroad led to Rome, which he first visited in the summer of...

Thornton Wilder was a student of the human condition; in his writing he aimed for and achieved the universal. His plays in particular were concerned with both the timely and the timeless, and he most distinguished himself in the theater, although his fir...

Barack Obama is planning to deliver an important foreign policy speech on Tuesday, aides to Obama just told me. The speech is going to be billed as a comprehensive, substantive proposal for improving American's damaged international standing and fortifying its security by dealing more proactively...

One day while still a young actor, Elia Kazan was standing on a street corner with his good friend, Martin Ritt, another young actor. Across the street were two pretty young women. Ritt suggested that he and Kazan go over and talk to them. “No...

One day while still a young actor, Elia Kazan was standing on a street corner with his good friend, Martin Ritt, another young actor. Across the street were two pretty young women. Ritt suggested that he and Kazan go over and talk to them. “No...

When The Skin of Our Teeth first appeared in 1942, Wilder deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for a play that stepped into what is pretentiously called the 'epistemological dimension', that area where are made to challenge our own unspoken assumptions and conventions for viewing and interpreting theatre. Did we believe, he asked, that what happens onstage must duplicate the everyday tangible world, that the proscenium arch is a keyhole through which we peep and overhear real people? Simultaneous t...

[Was Wilder serious] when he wrote The Skin of our Teeth thirty-five years' ago? It still gives off an endearing skittishness, though one suspects that the author of this 'history of mankind in comic strip' was being more serious than he dared to let on with his theme of mothers stabilising man's inherent waywardness and lust making the world go round. Whatever he meant,… [this boisterously facetious parable reminds us] how such a play, because of its fundamental thoughtfu...