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...

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...

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...

Thornton Wilder, with an enthusiasm for experimentation and keen observation of human experience, enlivened the American literary scene in the middle years of the twentieth century. He received numerous awards, including the first Presidential Medal of...

Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist....

Play ballsy: Billy Bob and the fine art of cursing LOS ANGELES The most cosmopolitan cracker ever to play Santa Claus and Davy Crockett, Billy Bob Thornton is a walking contradiction, reconciling the conflicting aesthetics of Northern and Southern truth and fiction....

The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder IT IS AN odd experience to learn that the author of Our Town and The Matchmaker was once attacked for ignoring American subject matter in favor of dimly imagined classical worlds full of "little lavender...

It has come round again: the day of the year I most cherish and dread. I am not drawn to the commerce of the occasion- the forced buys of somehow-not-as-fragrant-as-in-the-past lilacs (Where have the true aromatic lilacs gone? To botanical heaven, every one?) Certainly I'm...

Today is Sunday, Jan. 22, the 22nd day of 2007. There are 343 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Jan. 22, 1917, President Wilson pleaded for an end to war in Europe, calling for "peace without victory." (By April, however, America also was...

[The Cabala (1926)] deals with a variety of plots, intrigues, and society gossip among a rather loosely joined group composed of wealthy, extremely conservative individuals—some of aristocratic backgrounds—living in modern Rome. Unable to adjust to modern political realities—the growing threat of fascism is mentioned occasionally—they cultivate ideas of a peculiarly retrogressive, highly reactionary utopia. (p. 14) Wilder is obviously less interested in the history of the Cabala ...

That an examination of Kierkegaard's influence on The Eighth Day will prove fruitful we have Wilder's own word. John Ashley, the hero of the novel, is repeatedly called a man of faith. Noticing what seemed to me striking parallels between Ashley and Kierkegaard's knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, I wrote to Mr. Wilder to inquire about the matter. In a letter addressed to me dated April 24, 1971, he responded: "Yes, indeed John Ashley is a sketch of Kierkegaard's knigh...

Inspired by Dreiser's Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural, Wilder's Angel That Troubled the Waters consists of sixteen three-minute plays for three actors. The plays draw upon history, legend, and invention; the staging directions are elaborate, the dialogue pretentious, and the plays are interesting only as evidence of Wilder's early disinclination for the dominant realist mode, which prefigures his lifelong rebellion against the box-set…. More mannered than the dialogue o...

America's national identity has been mirrored through its arts programs and use of drama and theatre. "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder and "Streetcar named Desire" by Tennessee Williams are reflections of society's values, concerns and issues from the era they were sprung.