1. Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist.
26 Facts About Thornton Wilder
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Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzer Prizes, for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a US National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.
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All of the surviving Thornton Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China when their father was stationed in Hong Kong and Shanghai as US Consul General.
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Thornton Wilder was a noted poet and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics.
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Thornton Wilder began writing plays while at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual.
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Thornton Wilder attended the English China Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai, but returned with his mother and siblings to California in 1912 because of the unstable political conditions in China at the time.
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Thornton Wilder served a three-month enlistment in the US Army's Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams in Rhode Island during World War I, eventually rising to the rank of corporal.
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Thornton Wilder attended Oberlin College before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920 at Yale University, where he refined his writing skills as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a literary society.
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Thornton Wilder earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926.
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World War II saw Thornton Wilder rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the US Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945.
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Thornton Wilder went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor.
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Proficient in four languages, Thornton Wilder translated plays by Andre Obey and Jean-Paul Sartre.
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Thornton Wilder wrote the libretti of two operas, The Long Christmas Dinner, composed by Paul Hindemith, and The Alcestiad, composed by Louise Talma and based on his own play.
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Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town, a popular play set in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire.
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Thornton Wilder suffered from writer's block while writing the final act.
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Thornton Wilder himself played the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in summer stock productions.
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In 1938, Max Reinhardt directed a Broadway production of The Merchant of Yonkers, which Thornton Wilder had adapted from Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen.
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Thornton Wilder had met Jean-Paul Sartre on a US lecture tour after the war, and was under the influence of existentialism, although rejecting its atheist implications.
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In 1954, Tyrone Guthrie encouraged Thornton Wilder to rework The Merchant of Yonkers into The Matchmaker.
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In 1960, Thornton Wilder was awarded the first ever Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture.
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In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder lived for 20 months in the small town of Douglas, Arizona, apart from family and friends.
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The Library of America republished all of Thornton Wilder's plays in 2007, together with some of his writings on the theater and the screenplay of Shadow of a Doubt.
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Finally, the third and final volume in the Library of America series on Thornton Wilder was released in 2011, containing his last two novels The Eighth Day and Theophilus North, as well as four autobiographical sketches.
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Robert Gottlieb, reviewing Penelope Niven's work in The New Yorker in 2013, claimed Thornton Wilder had become infatuated with a man, not identified by Gottlieb, and Thornton Wilder's feelings were not reciprocated.
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Thornton Wilder died of heart failure in his Hamden, Connecticut, house on December 7,1975, at age 78.
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Thornton Wilder is interred at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hamden.