The Eighth Day (63 page)
Wilder and his work received many honors, highlighted by the three Pulitzer Prizes, the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Order of Merit (Peru), the Goethe-Plakette der Stadt (Germany, 1959), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963), the National Book Committee's first National Medal for Literature (1965), and the National Book Award for Fiction (1967).
He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, to Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder. The family later lived in China and in California, where Wilder was graduated from Berkeley High School. After two years at Oberlin College, he went on to Yale, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1920. A valuable part of his education took place during summers spent working hard on farms in California, Kentucky, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. His father arranged these rigorous “shirtsleeve” jobs for Wilder and his older brother, Amos, as part of their initiation into the American experience.
Thornton Wilder studied archaeology and Italian as a special student at the American Academy in Rome (1920â1921), and earned a master of arts degree in French literature at Princeton in 1926.
In addition to his talents as playwright and novelist, Wilder was an accomplished teacher, essayist, translator, scholar, lecturer, librettist, and screenwriter. In 1942, he teamed with Alfred Hitchcock to write the first draft of the screenplay for the classic thriller
Shadow of a Doubt
, receiving credit as principal writer and a special screen credit for his “contribution to the preparation” of the production. All but fluent in four languages, Wilder translated and adapted plays by such varied authors as Henrik Ibsen, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Obey. As a scholar, he conducted significant research on James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
and the plays of Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega.
Wilder's friends included a broad spectrum of figures on both sides of the AtlanticâHemingway, Fitzgerald, Alexander Woollcott, Gene Tunney, Sigmund Freud, producer Max Reinhardt, Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, and Garson Kanin. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Wilder was especially close to Gertrude Stein and became one of her most effective interpreters and champions. Many of Wilder's friendships are documented in his prolific correspondence. Wilder believed that great letters constitute a “great branch of literature.” In a lecture entitled “On Reading the Great Letter Writers,” he wrote that a letter can function as a “literary exercise,” the “profile of a personality,” and “news of the soul,” apt descriptions of thousands of letters he wrote to his own friends and family.
Wilder enjoyed acting and played major roles in several of his own plays in summer theater productions. He also possessed a lifelong love of music; reading musical scores was a hobby, and he wrote the librettos for two operas based on his work:
The Long Christmas Dinner
, with composer Paul Hindemith, and
The Alcestiad
, with composer Louise Talma. Both works premiered in Germany.
Teaching was one of Wilder's deepest passions. He began his teaching career in 1921 as an instructor in French at Lawrenceville, a private secondary school in New Jersey. Financial independence after the publication of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
permitted him to leave the classroom in 1928, but he returned to teaching in the 1930s at the University of Chicago. For six years, on a part-time basis, he taught courses there in classics in translation, comparative literature, and composition. In 1950â1951, he served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Wilder's gifts for scholarship and teaching (he treated the classroom as all but a theater) made him a consummate, much-sought-after lecturer in his own country and abroad. After World War II, he held special standing, especially in Germany, as an interpreter of his own country's intellectual traditions and their influence on cultural expression.
During World War I, Wilder had served a three-month stint as an enlisted man in the Coast Artillery section of the army, stationed at Fort Adams, Rhode Island. He volunteered for service in World War II, advancing to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Army Air Force Intelligence. For his service in North Africa and Italy, he was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, the Chevalier Legion d'Honneur, and honorary officership in the Military Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.).
From royalties received from
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, Wilder built a house for his family in 1930 in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven. But he typically spent as many as two hundred days a year away from Hamden, traveling to and settling in a variety of places that provided the stimulation and solitude he needed for his work. Sometimes his destination was the Arizona desert, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, or Martha's Vineyard, Newport, Saratoga Springs, Vienna, or Baden-Baden. He wrote aboard ships, and often chose to stay in “spas in off-season.” He needed a certain refuge when he was deeply immersed in writing a novel or play. Wilder explained his habit to a
New Yorker
journalist in 1959: “The walks, the quietâall the elegance is present, everything is there but the people. That's it! A spa in off-season! I make a practice of it.”
But Wilder always returned to “the house
The Bridge
built,” as it is still known to this day. He died there of a heart attack on December 7, 1975.
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ACK
A
DS
LSO BY
T
HORNTON
W
ILDER
BOOKS BY THORNTON WILDER
NOVELS
The Cabala and The Woman of Andros
COLLECTIONS OF SHORT PLAYS
The Angel That Troubled the Waters
The Long Christmas Dinner & Other Plays in One Act
PLAYS
The Merchant of Yonkers
The Matchmaker
The Alcestiad
ESSAYS
American Characteristics & Other Essays
The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939â1961
REDITS
Getty Images; bottom © Fred Edwards/
Getty images
Author photograph © Paul Conklin
OPYRIGHT
HARPERPERENNIAL
MODERNCLASSICS
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1967 by The Union & New Haven Trust Company, by arrangement with Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. It is here reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Thornton Wilder.
T
HE EIGHTH DAY
. Copyright © 1967 by The Union & New Haven Trust Company. Foreword copyright © 2006 by John Updike. Afterword copyright © 2006 by Tappan Wilder. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2006.
ISBN 978-0-06-008891-0
EPub Edition February 2014 ISBN 9780062232687
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*
Wilder read
Fear and Trembling;
if he read
Concluding Scientific Postscript
, he would have come across: “Is not his incognito this, that there is nothing whatever to be noticed, nothing at all that could arouse suspicion of the hidden inwardness.”
[For the record, while based in Douglas, Wilder did take books from the University of Arizona library, but he always wore a necktie and never asked anyone from away to stop by to visit. There is no evidence he fed rattlesnakes.
Plays for Bleecker Street
opened at Circle-in-the Square Theatre on January 11, 1962 and ran for 132 performances.]