[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...

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 his knowledge of German and German literature with maturity: some of the lines in his early plays are in German; his first published collection of drama, The Angel that Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, published in 1928, is dedicated to Max Reinhardt; he visited Berlin in 1928, at the time when Brecht's plays were receiving considerable notice; m...

"American Characteristics," the collection of Wilder essays (a few of them reconstructed from notes or newly published), contains no startling personal revelations, but it does suggest the extent and diversity of an intellectual or mental terrain still not fully explored by his biographers…. These observations about writers and art and books—"bookishness" in its best sense he defined as "loving great books as though they were people"—disclose th...

[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 young man's attempts at saintly midwifery and playing deus ex machina to bring to birth peace of mind in petty souls. In brief, sentimental drivel, [although] competent insofar as remembered craftsmanship and Wilder's memory of the 1920s were concerned…. The kindest thing one can say is that, just perhaps although there is no...

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, ever of passages, from one essay to the next. Several of the never-before-published essays might best have been left that way (these reveal Wilder's confessed difficulty in "putting down one declarative sentence after another" in stilted or scatter-shot organization). And, to get the carping over with, Wilder's �...

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 source and culmination of all that is enduring and wonderful about humanity, and most of Wilder's dramaturgy consists of brandishing this great, shaggy, unwashed lowest common denominator of a we as the tool, subject, and end product of playwriting. But lowest common denominators are too low and common for art: even Whitman, that ot...

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, "The Woman of Andros," should try to have his way with Alcestis…. ["The Alcestiad"] is certainly inferior to the major Wilder plays, but it is interesting as an example of the playwright's work and as another variation on the Alcestis story.