One moment in time utah8/23/2023 ![]() They were assured of eternal life in the next world and, in this, they were squarely seated on Property and the privileges that accompany it” (ix). “They were,” he argued, “pious, law-abiding, and industrious. The culprits for this devitalization of the theatre were, Wilder believed, the members of the middle class. He went on to say, “The tragic had no heat the comic had no bite the social criticism failed to indict us with responsibility” (viii). In his preface to Three Plays by Thornton Wilder, he wrote, “Toward the end of the twenties I began to lose pleasure in going to the theatre” (vii). There was, however, one part of his middle class, middle American heritage with which Wilder became more and more dissatisfied. As a result, Wilder kept his optimism about America, and to a large extent he continued to share its religious values, though he examined them carefully in his novel Heaven’s My Destination (l935). He did not experience the love-hate relationship that develops when one place and its values appear to be all the world. Scott Fitzgerald felt alienated from the America where they grew up, Wilder “had never lived in one place long enough to grow attached to it, and he seems to have felt at home wherever he went” (Burbank 22). While other writers of his generation such as Ernest Hemingway and F. In an odd way it is Thornton Wilder’s very cosmopolitanism, his distance from small-town America, that made it possible for him to visualize it lovingly in Our Town. His Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (l927) is set in Peru in l7l4, and his play The Matchmaker (l954) is largely based on Johann Nestroy’s drama Einen Jux will er sich Machen (l842). Nor were Greece, Rome, and France the limits of Wilder’s interests. In The Ides of March (l948), Wilder abandoned modern Rome altogether, writing a historical novel set in Julius Caesar’s time. The characters, who are ostensibly modern Romans, are actually stand-ins for the Olympian gods, and “the spirit of Virgil pervades the scene and finally appears to the narrator as he departs for New York” (Rex Burbank, Thornton Wilder, 37). ![]() Published in l926, The Cabala demonstrates Wilder’s deep interest in classical languages and culture. Also during this period he took a year for travel in Europe and completed his first novel, The Cabala, a work influenced by Henry James and the fantasy writer James Branch Cabell. At the time Wilder was working at Princeton on a master’s degree in French, which he completed in l925. In l920-2l he studied archaeology at the American Academy in Rome.īetween l92l and l928, he taught French at a boys’ school at Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Thornton Wilder attended mission schools in China, high school in Berkeley, California, and studied at both Oberlin College and Yale University. However, what might have been a typical midwestern childhood changed when Wilder’s father, a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, was rewarded with an appointment as consul general to Shanghai and Hong Kong in Roosevelt’s second term. On 17 April l897, he was born in Madison, Wisconsin, where his father edited and published a newspaper. It is ironic that Thornton Wilder, who in Our Town created one of the clearest visions of small-town America, was one of the most cosmopolitan authors this country has produced.
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