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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 dramatic work is the result not of a limitation of talent or interest; rather, it is due to the fact that his abilities and inclinations were multifocused, without becoming diffused. His career is marked with superior achievement in three fields: academics and fiction as well as drama. Beginning as a schoolmaster for young boys, he eventually held the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard. His fiction was rewarded with both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In the field of drama, Our Town (1938) not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but has become this country's best-known and most-produced play. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), another Pulitzer Prize winner, expanded Wilder's reputation to international status; the play's high esteem continues in the United States as well as Europe, and particularly in Germany.
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