Wilder, Thornton (Niven)

Wilder, Thornton [Niven] (1897–1975), born in Wisconsin, was reared in China and the U.S., and after graduation from Yale (1920) became a teacher at the Lawrenceville School (1921–28) and a professor of English at the University of Chicago (1930–36). His first book, The Cabala (1926), is a gracefully written and deftly ironic novel, concerning the sophisticated but decaying Italian nobility of the post‐World War I period. After producing The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926) at a little theater, he suddenly achieved wide popularity with The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927, Pulitzer Prize), a delicately ironic study of the way Providence has directed disparate lives to one end. His next novels are The Woman of Andros (1930), an urbane treatment of human relations and ethical values in its story of a Greek concubine, based on Terence's Latin comedy Andrea; Heaven's My Destination (1935), an amused, ironic portrait of an evangelically religious American salesman; and The Ides of March (1948), divergent views of Caesar's last months seen through letters and documents.

Having published collections of one‐act plays, The Angel That Troubled the Waters (1928) and The Long Christmas Dinner (1931), and made adaptations, Wilder came to his full development as a playwright with Our Town (1938, Pulitzer Prize), depicting the qualities of small‐town New England life. Later plays include The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), a comedy revised as The Matchmaker (1954), and by others made into the musical comedy Hello, Dolly! (1963); The Skin of Our Teeth (1942, Pulitzer Prize), said to have been inspired by Joyce's Finnegans Wake; A Life in the Sun (London, 1955), based on Euripides' Alcestis and produced in dramatic (1960) and operatic (1962) versions as The Alcestiad in German and finally published in its English text in the U.S. in 1977; and Plays for Bleecker Street (1962), three unpublished one‐act plays, part of a projected 14‐play cycle on the Seven Ages of Man and the Seven Deadly Sins.

Wilder returned to the novel with The Eighth Day (1967, National Book Award), a chronicle of two early 20th‐century Midwestern families and their involvement in a murder case raising serious questions about human nature; and Theophilus North (1973), portraying the good deeds of the title character, a tutor in Newport, R.I., during the 1920s, whose various saintly actions are presented in closely related short stories, by turns comic, sentimental, serious, and optimistic. Wilder's essays were posthumously collected as American Characteristics (1979). He was the first person to be awarded a National Medal for Literature (1965).