1917, and then transferred to Yale.
After World War I broke out, he interrupted his studies to serve as a corporal in the Coast Artillery at Narragansett Bay in 1918. Returning to college after the Armistice, Wilder graduated from Yale in 1920. William Lyon Phelps wrote of him: “As an undergraduate he was unusually versatile, original and clever. He played and composed music, wrote much prose and verse, and stood well in the studies of the course.”
Upon leaving Yale, Wilder did a year of archeological study at the American Academy of Classical Studies in Rome. From 1921 to 1928 he taught French at Lawrenceville Academy. During this period he continued his graduate work, receiving his master’s degree from Princeton in 1926.
All the while, Wilder had been writing on the side, experimenting with narrative style and technique, determined to write for pleasure, not for profit. When his first novel, The Cabala, appeared in 1926, many critics praised the graceful and distinguished literary style; however, his short tale of the decay of a group of sophisticates in Rome was too remote for the work to have general appeal. Also that year, the American Laboratory Theatre produced his first play, The Trumpet Shall Sound.
Then, in 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey was accepted for publication. According to one story, the book was published solely because the publishers thought that so fine a work ought to be printed; they had little expectation of its success with the public. But the public was enthusiastic—the book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928—and each year thousands of new readers acclaim Wilder’s story of the five who perished on a fragile bridge. The Bridge of San Luis Rey contains no furious action. It is short on violence and does not capitalize on an exotic setting. Yet the appeal of the book is universal; like Brother Juniper, all people everywhere sooner or later are challenged by the proposition, “Either we live by accident and die by accident or we live by plan and die by plan.” Although it was never Wilder’s aim nor Brother Juniper’s fortune to discover an answer, there is in his novel a pattern of meaning to the passions and errors and longings of human beings. The meaning is a human one, for although we can never be totally assured of Divine Intervention in our every movement on earth, the “bridge” of love that connects one to another gives dignity and purpose to even the lowliest of lives.
During the next ten years Thornton Wilder continued to experiment with style and form, particularly in his plays. His short plays, the essence of which appeared in full-length and maturer pieces later on, were collected and published in separate volumes: The Angel That Troubled the Waters (1928) and The Long Christmas Dinner (1931) The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), his one unsuccessful play, he later reworked into The Matchmaker, which opened a long run on Broadway in the winter 0f 1955. In The Woman of Andros (1930), his third novel, the principal character re-echoed Wilder’s insistent belief in the glory of living in spite of the folly and pain: “I have known the worst that the world can do to me, and ... nevertheless I praise the world and all living:” Heaven’s My Destination (1935), Wilder’s fourth novel and the first to have an American setting, recounted the hilarious adventures of George Brush, an itinerant, evangelistic textbook salesman. For all of George’s simplicity and his bumbling errors in the realm of the worldly wise, he maintains an awkward goodness that shores up his Faith.
In the space of five years Wilder won his second and third Pulitzer awards for two plays, Our Town in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942. In their staging and form, both plays broke away from the box sets and specificity of character and historical time and place so typical of the traditional drama. Wilder abandoned scenery, made use of the aisles as well as the stage platform, and compressed years and even centuries into a few hours of playing time. But it is the extraordinary capsulizing of cosmic human experience on the stage and Wilder’s profound belief in the value of the smallest event in our daily lives, as well as humanity’s fumbling struggle to prevail, that make these plays endure. The Grover’s Corners of Our Town is any community of common people; the lives of its townsfolk—enmeshed in triviality, boredom and love for each other—are our lives; and Emily’s anguished plea as she returns to the land of the dead—that we must learn to realize life as we live it, “every, every minute”—has struck deep in the conscience of millions of playgoers. In the farcical and fantastic The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder dramatized the entire history of mankind from the Stone Age to the present in the persons of the Antrobus family. Wilder’s characters are foolish, inspired, insupportably blind and primitively courageous. But amidst all the disasters known to earth, the family of man keeps fumbling through. “All I ask,” says George Antrobus at the end, “is the chance to build new worlds and God has always given us that. And has given us voices to guide us, and the memory of our mistakes to warn us.”
* * * Wilder volunteered for service during World War II (“I was already a rather old man, was fit only for staff work, but I certainly did it with conviction.”). Now in his mid-sixties, he travels extensively, reads voluminously, attends concerts and gives lectures, and is currently at work on a cycle of one-act plays devoted to the Seven Ages of Man. Three of these—Infancy, Childhood and Lust—were produced under the collective title Plays for Bleecker Street at the Circle in the Square Theatre in January, 1962.
A recent critic has labeled Thornton Wilder an Unfashionable Optimist, whose works embody his “concern with, admiration for and love of human life at its most ordinary. ...” And though he has been damned as the model of adolescent enthusiasm in a decaying world (as well as honored by governments and universities), Wilder himself, like many of his fictional characters, seems to keep a bear hug on life. “The most valuable thing I inherited,” he once said in an interview, “was a temperament that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope.”
