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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 distinguished himself in the theater, although his first literary success was as a novelist. In a 1938 interview Wilder said, "Everything I have written has been a preparation for writing for the stage--my novels, my two volumes of one-act plays, my adaptations of Obey's Lucrece and Ibsen's A Doll's House. I like to think of all that as an apprenticeship. For the drama, it seems to me, is the most satisfying of all art-forms." Wilder was the first major American playwright to discard the trappings of the box set and fourth-wall realism in favor of a bare stage and presentational theatrical style. The full-length plays Our Town (performed in 1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) and the one-act plays The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, The Long Christmas Dinner , and Pullman Car Hiawatha, all published in 1931, influenced American playwrights from Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller to Edward Albee and John Guare.
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