Thornton Wilder (131 page)

Thornton Wilder and American actress and singer Ethel Waters after their arrival at West Berlin's Tempelhof Airport, September 11, 1957, for performances in Wilder's one-act plays at Congress Hall.
(Photograph by Kreusch/AP Photo. Courtesy of AP Images.)

Wilder with Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin in Williamstown, 1959.
(Photograph by William Tague. Courtesy of the Williamstown Theatre Festival.)

Thornton Wilder, the perennial traveler, on his way to board the train in New Haven for one more departure, May 1960.
(Courtesy of the Wilder Family LLC and YCAL.)

Wilder receiving the first-ever National Medal for Literature from the National Book Committee, in a ceremony at the White House with Lady Bird Johnson and Donald McGannon, television broadcasting executive and president of the National Book Committee, May 4, 1965.
(Courtesy of the Wilder Family LLC and YCAL.)

Wilder sails for Italy aboard the American Export Lines SS
Independence
, November 18, 1955.
(© Bettmann/CORBIS. Courtesy of CORBIS Images.)

He was a refined gypsy, wandering the world, writing, he said, for and about “Everybody.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PENELOPE NIVEN
is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of poet Carl Sandburg and photographer Edward Steichen, as well as
Swimming Lessons
, a memoir, and
Voices and Silences
, coauthored with the actor James Earl Jones. She is the recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Thornton Wilder Visiting Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and other fellowships and awards. Niven lectures both in the United States and abroad, and she has served as a consultant for television films about Sandburg, Steichen, and Jones. She lives in North Carolina.

 

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ALSO BY PENELOPE NIVEN

 

NONFICTION

Carl Sandburg: A Biography

Voices and Silences

(coauthor with James Earl Jones)

Steichen: A Biography

Swimming Lessons

 

NONFICTION FOR CHILDREN

Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet

CREDITS

The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the consent of the Wilder Family LLC, courtesy of The Barbara Hogenson Agency, to print the published and unpublished writings of Thornton Wilder and the Wilder family, as well as the photographs of Thornton Wilder and the Wilder family.

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes
Cover photograph of Thornton Wilder playing the Stage Manager in
Our Town
courtesy of Special Collections, The College of Wooster Libraries

COPYRIGHT

THORNTON WILDER
. Copyright © 2012 by Penelope Niven. 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 ebook 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 ebooks.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-083136-3

Epub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062097774

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