Thornton Wilder (109 page)

11.
Ibid.

12.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder, [1928?], TNW Collection, YCAL, quoted in Tappan Wilder, afterword to
The Cabala and the Woman of Andros,
228.

13.
TNW, notations on manuscript of
The Woman of Andros,
TNW Collection, YCAL.

14.
TNW to ANW, [August 1929?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

15.
Ibid.

16.
TNW, Income Tax Summary, Private Collection.

17.
TNW to Sarah Frantz, October 13, 1934
SL
, 287–88.

18.
TNW to T. E. Lawrence, January 20, 1930,
SL
, 244–45.

19.
TNW to Isabel and Isabella Niven Wilder, date illegible [May 1930?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

20.
TNW to Lee Keedick, [June 1928?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

21.
TNW, 1929 Appointment Book, TNW Collection, YCAL.

22.
John E. Pember, “Thornton Wilder No Slave to His Work; Drops Everything and Takes a Rest Whenever He Feels Like It,”
Boston Herald Magazine,
March 31, 1929, 2; reprinted in Bryer,
Conversatioins with Thornton Wilder
, 3–8.

23.
TNW to Lee Keedick, April 11, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

24.
TNW to Lee Keedick, April 19, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

25.
Ibid.

26.
TNW to Lee Keedick, December 19, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

27.
Some passages about
The Woman of Andros
were first published in my foreword to TNW's
The Cabala and The Woman of Andros
, xi–xxv. All citations of
The Woman of Andros
refer to this edition.

28.
TNW to Isabel Wilder, September 27, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

29.
TNW to Lee Keedick, November 23, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

30.
TNW to Isabel Wilder, September 27, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

31.
Ibid.

32.
TNW to Isabel Wilder, October 7, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

33.
TNW to Isabel Wilder, September 27, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

34.
TNW to Sybil Colefax, November 24, 1929, New York University.

35.
Ibid.

36.
TNW to Albert Boni, January 23, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

37.
Frederick James Smith, “Wilder and Wilder: Mlle. Damita Torches Up the Bridge of San Luis Rey,”
Liberty,
April 27, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.
Liberty,
a weekly magazine with a circulation of three million, was one of the most popular magazines in the United States during the twenties and thirties.

38.
TNW to Mrs. Coker, c/o the X.X.M.D. Study Club, St. Joseph, Missouri, December 15, 1947, Private Collection.

39.
TNW, 1929 Journal, Entries 71–72, TNW Collection, YCAL.

40.
Other playwrights who adapted Terence's comedy were Richard Steele,
The Conscious Lovers
, in 1722; and Daniel Bellamy,
The Perjured Devotee
, in 1739.

41.
This passage is adapted from my foreword to
The Woman of Andros
, xxi–xxii.

42.
TNW, 1929 Journal, Entry 73, TNW Collection, YCAL. TNW to Norman Fitts,
SL
, 240–41.

43.
TNW, 1929 Journal, Entry 73.

44.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, July 24, 1929,
SL
, 237–40.

45.
TNW,
The Cabala and The Woman of Andros,
137.

46.
Ibid., 184.

47.
Ibid., 150–51.

48.
Ibid., 179.

49.
Ibid., 176.

50.
Ibid., 197.

51.
Ibid., 148–50.

52.
Ibid., 197.

53.
TNW, 1929 Journal, Entry 77, TNW Collection, YCAL.

54.
Ibid.

55.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, February 20, 1930,
SL
, 246–47.

56.
Ibid.

57.
TNW to Lee Keedick, December 19, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

58.
Lee Keedick to TNW, telegram, January 7, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

59.
TNW to Lee Keedick, telegram, January 9, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

60.
“The Future of American Literature,” University of Iowa brochure, 1930, Private Collection.

61.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, February 20, 1930,
SL
, 246–47.

 

21: “VARIETY, VARIETY” (1930S)

1.
TNW, “CHRONOLOGY,” n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL. (The list ends at 1952.)

2.
Ibid.

3.
Advertisement,
Saturday Review of Literature,
March 15, 1930.

4.
Wilson, “The Critic Who Does Not Exist,”
Shores of Light
, 369. For reference to Gold's intelligence, see Wilson, “Dos Passos and the Social Revolution,”
Shores of Light,
433.

5.
TNW was just one target of what the critic Joan Acocella calls “the politicizing of criticism in the thirties,” along with Willa Cather, William Faulkner, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others. Joan Acocella,
Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism
(New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 2002), 24–29.

6.
Michael Gold, “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ,”
New Republic,
October 22, 1930.

7.
“I kept to one issue with Mike,” Carl Sandburg wrote Archibald MacLeish October 6, 1933. “I had to hold in because I have Mike's number from so many directions.” Sandburg had written for left-wing publications, and for a time lent his name to the masthead of Gold's
New Masses.

8.
Edmund Wilson, “The Literary Class War,”
New Republic,
May 4, 1932; reprinted in
Shores of Light
, 534–39.

9.
TNW to Lee Keedick, November 23, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

10.
TNW to Sybil Colefax, November 24, 1929, New York University.

11.
TNW to William Prohme, “Wilder vs. His Critics,”
Honolulu
Advertiser
, November 5, 1933. See also, for Hawaii lecture coverage, “Author Finds Hawaii to His Liking,”
Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
November 2, 1933; TNW to Clifford Gessler, “Wilder Talks on the Novel: Novelist Tells How Literature Gives Coherence to Chaotic World,” November 10, 1933 [one of Wilder's lecture topics in Hawaii was “Some Thoughts on the Novel”]; TNW to Edna B. Lawson, “Wilder Predicts Drama as Form of American Literary Expression,”
Honolulu Advertiser,
November 17, 1933; “Wilder Talks on the Drama: Theater May Be on the Eve of Great Era, Says Author in Closing Lecture,”
Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
November 17, 1933.

12.
TNW to Sybil Colefax, November 2, 1932,
SL
, 255–59.

13.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, July 24, 1929,
SL
, 237–40.

14.
TNW to Dr. —Bridges, July 31, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

15.
For background on Robert Maynard Hutchins, see Mary Ann Dzuback,
Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Harry S. Ashmore,
Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

16.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder, (Spring 1930?), TNW Collection, YCAL.

17.
TNW to Isabella Niven and APW, February 2, 1932, TNW Collection, YCAL.

18.
Isabella Niven Wilder to Dwight Dana, May 7, 1931, TNW Collection, YCAL.

19.
Dwight Dana to TNW, September 10, 1931, carbon copy, Private Collection.

20.
Dwight Dana to TNW, October 13, 1931, carbon copy, Private Collection.

21.
TNW to Dwight Dana, November 2, 1931, TNW Collection, YCAL.

22.
Ibid.

23.
TNW to Family, May 5, 1931, TNW Collection, YCAL.

24.
TNW to Edward Sheldon, August 7, 1933,
SL
, 262–66.

25.
TNW, preface to
Three Plays
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), xxv. This volume contains the texts of
Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth
, and
The Matchmaker.

26.
Ibid.

27.
The Long Christmas Dinner
was produced in November 1931 in New Haven by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar College Philalethesis, for instance, and
Pullman Car Hiawatha
was staged at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in March 1932. That same month
Queens of France
graced the stage at Wilder's mother's alma mater, the Misses Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and the Hill School, Pottstown, Pennsylvania. For additional production and publishing details for these one-act plays, see Donald Gallup and A. Tappan Wilder, eds.,
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder
(New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997), vol. 1, 321–22.

28.
TNW, preface to
Three Plays
, xxx.

29.
TNW to Bob McCoy, “Thornton Wilder in Our Town,”
San Juan Star,
January 2, 1974; reprinted in Bryer,
Conversations with Thornton Wilder,
110–15.

30.
TNW, Journal, Entry 80, June 27, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

31.
Isabel Wilder, TS, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged manuscripts.

32.
TNW,
The Cabala and The Woman of Andros,
134.

33.
TNW to Bill Nichols, [Summer 1932?], Nichols Papers, LC.

34.
TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, [1934?], YCAL.

35.
TNW to Isabel Wilder, May 1, 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL. Texas Guinan wrote to TNW on her distinctive letterhead, emblazoned with a map of Texas on the palm of a hand supporting the word “TEXAS” in bold black letters, with the “Guinan” arranged under the hand like a jewel-encrusted bracelet. She invited Wilder to visit her and offered to give a party for him, promising to do her best to entertain him. See Texas Guinan to TNW, June 25, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

36.
TNW to Dwight Dana, January 18, 1932, TNW Collection, YCAL.

37.
Also among TNW's Chicago friends was the former University of Chicago student Martha Dodd (later Martha Dodd Stern), assistant literary editor of the
Chicago Tribune.
TNW exchanged a few flirtatious letters with Martha Dodd. She left Chicago in 1933 to accompany her father, William Dodd, to Germany, where he took up his post as U.S. ambassador in Berlin. Martha Dodd also wrote flirtatious letters to Chicagoan Carl Sandburg (thirty years older than she, and a friend of her father's), and a number of other men over the years, sometimes giving the false impression, deliberately or otherwise, that there had been a full-fledged love affair.

38.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, November 2, 1932,
SL
, 255–59.

39.
TNW to Edward Sheldon, August 7, 1933,
SL
, 262–66.

40.
Ibid.

41.
TNW to Ruth Gordon, June 18, 1933, Private Collection.

42.
TNW to Family, June 26, 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL.

43.
Dzuback,
Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator,
100.

44.
TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, [1934?], YCAL.

45.
Fanny Butcher,
Many Lives—One Love
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 79.

46.
TNW to Isabel Wilder, May 1, 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL.

47.
TNW to Ruth Gordon, June 18, 1933, Private Collection.

48.
TNW to Edward Sheldon, August 7, 1933,
SL
, 262–66.

49.
Ibid. Sadly, after her run at the fair, Guinan took her show on a Western tour and fell gravely ill. She died that November in Vancouver. She was forty-nine years old.

50.
TNW to Edward Sheldon, August 7, 1933,
SL
, 262–66.

51.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, August 30, 1933, New York University.

52.
Ibid.

53.
Here, as elsewhere, I quote from or cite my foreword to
The Cabala and The Woman of Andros,
in this instance, from p. xxi.

54.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, November 2, 1932,
SL
, 255–59.

55.
Ibid.