As Wilder himself said in the preface to
Three Plays (1957), he hoped he had played a role in preparing the way for those new dramatists to come after him.
Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on 17 April 1897 to parents of New England descent, Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder. His father, who had earned a doctorate in political science at Yale University, was the editor of The Wisconsin State Journal during the time of the Progressive movement in Wisconsin; his mother was a daughter of a Presbyterian minister and a devotee of world literature and music. When Wilder was nine years old, his father was appointed consul general of Hong Kong under the Theodore Roosevelt administration, and the Wilder family, consisting of two girls and two boys, moved to the Orient (a third daughter was born in 1910).
Wilder's first exposure to theater occurred before he reached his teens. Isabella Wilder and the children had returned to the United States while Amos Wilder remained at the consulate in Hong Kong.
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