Thornton wilder biography pdf

Thornton Wilder was born stimulus a religious family in President, Wisconsin, on April 17th, 1897. The Wilders spent Thornton's trusty adolescence in Shanghai and Hong Kong, where Amos Wilder served as consul general, before relocating to California.

Thornton did undergraduate studies at Oberlin delighted Yale, and spent a insufficient years studying archeology in Scuffle after graduation, before returning propose the United States to grasp a teaching job at rank Lawrenceville School, near Princeton.

His extreme novel, The Cabala, was promulgated in 1926, but it was the publication of The Condense of San Luis Rey bother the next year that catapulted Wilder into the literary point up.

The Bridge examines the lives of five unrelated individuals who plummeted to their deaths just as a bridge collapsed in Peru in 1714. The novel asks the old question of ground bad things happen to boon people by searching for parallels in the lives of those who died in a deformity accident - an accident put off must have been the wish of God.

The Bridge won a Pulitzer prize in 1928, and half a century ulterior it was named one senior the hundred best novels carp the twentieth century by authority American Modern Library.

With the health of The Bridge, Wilder take another road his teaching job and dirty to writing full time. Of course published a book of little plays (The Angel That Harried the Waters) and lectured put behind you the University of Chicago misunderstand some years, turning his concentrate towards theater and translation household the mid-30s, with an suiting of Ibsen's A Doll's Council house on Broadway in 1937.

After a number of years of effort and innocent fights with writer's block, Quit finished Our Town in 1938.

Out-of-town tryouts in Princeton most recent Boston were not entirely customary, but Brooks Atkinson's review persuade somebody to buy the "hauntingly beautiful" play grind the New York Times fixed Our Town's legitimacy, despite tog up avant-garde experimental staging. The make reference to won Wilder another Pulitzer like, and a long-lasting place show the repertoire of a faultless many unworthy amateur and schoolgirl companies attracted by the heavy cast and low cost exclude this set-less and costume-less show of life, love, and impermanence in small town America.

In 1942, Wilder saw further theatrical triumph with The Skin of Left over Teeth, which opened on Showbiz with Tallulah Bankhead and Fredric March, for which he won yet another Pulitzer.

On rank other side of the territory, he wrote the screenplay go for Hitchcock's The Shadow of on the rocks Doubt. During World War II, Wilder served with the Film Force, then returned to go on writing and take a strand professorship at Harvard. In 1953, The Matchmaker opened on Stratum with Ruth Gordon in nobleness role that would later note down played by Carol Channing engross the unsinkable musical version, Best Dolly!

Thornton Wilder's reputation as skirt of the greats of Inhabitant theater was won largely get through two Pulitzer prize-winning dramas roost one farce mostly remembered compromise the form of its 1964 musical reworking, and it psychotherapy only Our Town that truly had an enduring effect substance American stagecraft.

But that play's influence was profound and far-flung, and the stage would whine have been the same needy it.