Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975)
Thornton Wilder, with an enthusiasm for experimentation and keen observation of human experience, enlivened the American literary scene in the middle years of the twentiet...
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Biography EssayOn the strength of only three full-length plays and a bare handful of one-acts, Thornton Wilder ranks among the top half dozen playwrights in the history of American theater. The modest...
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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 ...
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A noted dramatist, novelist, and essayist, Thornton Wilder's name is known to most U.S. high school and college students because of the fame of his play, Our Town. First performed before American thea...
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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 abroa...
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On the strength of only three full-length plays and a bare handful of one-acts, Thornton Wilder ranks among the top half dozen playwrights in the history of American theatre. The modest volume of his ...
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Thornton Wilder, one of the last in the line of the New England puritan writers, was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on 17 April 1897. Second son of Amos Parker Wilder, a native of Maine and a descendant ...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Charles Wixson, Jr.
Wilder has known German since an early age. As a child he was sent to a German school in Hong Kong. Further, there is abundant evidence that he extended ...
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Critical Essay by Edward Ericson, Jr.
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,...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Wilder is obsessed with the notion of communality and identity of little people everywhere, but most particularly in middle America. They form, for him, a fictive we, the...
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Critical Essay by Victor White
[Theophilus North is] a story of a young tutor in the Newport of the 1920s, a mushy account of mild eccentrics and trivial complications and of a not very exciting youn...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Weales
It is hardly surprising that Thornton Wilder, who found his immediate inspiration in the writers he admired and who turned to the Greeks as early as his third novel, &...
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Critical Essay by Ruby Cohn
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 act...
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Critical Essay by Hermann Stresau
[The Cabala (1926)] deals with a variety of plots, intrigues, and society gossip among a rather loosely joined group composed of wealthy, extremely conservative indi...
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Critical Essay by Daniel Aaron
"American Characteristics," the collection of Wilder essays (a few of them reconstructed from notes or newly published), contains no startling personal re...
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Critical Essay by Megan Marshall
It would be safe to say that Wilder never intended [the essays in American Characteristics and Other Essays] to be collected—there is much repetition of ideas,...
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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...
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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 t...
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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 ...
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"I don't stay up nights worrying," said John Lennon in 1965. "Summers I used to cover Missouri," wrote Thornton Wilder in 1934. "I went over there afternoons," wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1929.Why do...
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John McCain was left for dead six months ago. Things have changed just a little.
The Town Hall in Peterborough, the picturesque village that inspired Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," fits 640 people. ...
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Today is Wednesday, Sept. 12, the 255th day of 2007. There are 110 days left in the year. The Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah begins at sunset.Today's Highlight in History:On Sept. 12, 1609, English e...
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“Money is like manure, it should be spread around,” Brooke Astor took to saying in later years.
In 1986, when she accepted an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for...
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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 t...
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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 t...
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Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, from his own screenplay, is the second installment of Mr. von Trier’s “American” trilogy following Dogville (2003), and is said to have been R...
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Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, from his own screenplay, is the second installment of Mr. von Trier’s “American” trilogy following Dogville (2003), and is said to have been R...
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Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975)
Thornton Niven Wilder
Thornton Wilder
Thornton (Niven) Wilder
Critical Essay by Douglas Charles Wixson, Jr.
American Dramatic Values Reflect the Society from Which They Spring.
Remembering Rosie: A Brave Single Mother Ahead of Her Time
