Wilder, Thornton. (1897 - 1975).
W o r k
- a novelist and playwright with a classical background: often charged for plagiarism
- received the Pulitzer Prize 3x: for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), and plays Our Town (1938), and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)
F i c t i o n :
The Cabala (1926):
- a series of episodical stories about the crises in the lives of individual members of a closed aristocratic community in Rome
The Bridge of San Louis Rey (1927):
- about the crush of a bridge in Peru
- separate stories of the pedestrians sharing their death in the crush
> the Pulitzer prize
The Ides of March (1948):
- a highly subjective and admiring interpretation of the character of Caesar
- confronts different ideas in the form of mutually written letters
D r a m a :
- an original and witty playwright with a great imagination
- discontented with the contemporary theatre: aimed to capture reality, made the audience ‘believe’ the work of the imagination, and made them realise they know the presented sentiments from their own experience
- believed the middle class harmful to culture: the middle-brows wanted soothing, sentimental, and melodramatic comedies
- used repetitive patterns of experience (x individuality in experience): specification and localisation prevented to show the repetitive patterns
< influenced by the Chinese and Japanese drama using primitive scenes x but: capturing reality
Our Town (1938):
- the value of the smallest events in our daily life: the children of neighbours share childhood and school, fall in love, and get married
- the sentimental idealism broken by the Stage Director = a spokesman for the author, and a dramatic persona participating in action and holding a God-like control over the events
- a mixture of realism x expressionism (introduces the ghosts of the dead): believes reality to be only inner, in the mind, not in things, and not in scenery
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942):
- begins by making fun of old-fashioned playwriting
- events of our homely daily life against the vast dimension of time and place: presents two times at once, the prehistoric times, and the today’s New Jersey suburb
- presents the past as a repeating pattern: we (= the mankind) are always escaping a similar catastrophe by the skin of our teeth
Basics
(Photo: Britannica).
-
Author
Thornton (Niven) Wilder. (1897 - 1975). American. -
Work
Playwright. Novelist. Author of Our Town (1938). -
Genres
Modern drama and fiction.
Literature
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. London: Penguin, 1991.
Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1994.
McQuade, Donald, gen.ed. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper & Collins, 1996.
Ruland, Richard, Malcolm Bradbury. Od puritanismu k postmodernismu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
Vančura, Zdeněk, ed. Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké. Praha: Odeon, 1979.
Quote
"I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for--whether it's a field, or a home, or a country".
From The Skin of Our Teeth (1942).