Thornton Wilder
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Thornton Wilder (1897 - 1975)

Thornton Wilder
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, USAmap
Ancestors ancestors
Died at age 78 in Hamden, Connecticut, USAmap
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Profile last modified | Created 17 Apr 2014
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Notables Project
Thornton Wilder is Notable.

Biography

American novelist and playwright, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" and two for his plays "Our Town" and "The Skin of Our Teeth", and a National Book Award for his novel "The Eighth Day".

He never married.

Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor[4] and U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Niven Wilder. All of the Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China. His older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, was Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, a noted poet, and foundational to the development of the field of theopoetics. Amos was also a nationally ranked tennis player who competed at the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1922. His sister, Isabel, was an accomplished writer. Both of his other sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist, attended Mount Holyoke College

Thornton earned his Master of Arts degree in French from Princeton University in 1926.] After graduating, Wilder studied in Rome, Italy, and then taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. In 1926 Wilder's first novel, The Cabala, was published. In 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success and his first Pulitzer Prize in 1928.

In 1962, Wilder was 65 years old, a famous writer. He was best known for his plays, like his Pulitzer-winning Our Town (1938) and The Matchmaker (1955), which was adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly!. He had not written a novel for almost 20 years. He was tired of being in the limelight, and he wanted to escape his comfortable life in Connecticut, so Wilder got in his Thunderbird convertible and headed southwest. The car broke down just outside of Douglas, Arizona, a town on the Mexican border, and that's where Wilder stayed for a year and a half. He was happy to be somewhere where nobody knew much about him or his writing. He rented an apartment with one bed for himself and one for all his papers. During the days he wrote, read, and took walks, and in the evenings he hung around the bar asking questions — so many questions that everyone called him "Doc" or "Professor." When he left Douglas at the end of 1963, he had a good start on a novel. In 1967 he published it as The Eighth Day, and it won a National Book Award.

He said, "There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head."

And: "The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, 'Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.' And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure."

Wilder died on December 7, 1975, age 78, in Hamden, Connecticut, where he lived for many years with his sister Isabel. He was interred at Hamden's Mount Carmel Cemetery.

Sources

Thornton Wilder - a life by Penelope Niven Thornton Wilder at Wikipedia

https://www.notablebiographies.com/We-Z/Wilder-Thornton.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1103/thornton-wilder





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Nice bio. It's not lost on me that it doesn't include that quote from Our Town which is probably his most germane, relative to this site: "And genealogists come up from Boston - get paid by city people for looking up their ancestors. They want to make sure they're Daughters of the American Revolution and of the Mayflower.... Will, I guess that don't do no harm, either. Wherever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense..."
posted by Gregory Morris