Collection of early reviews and modern scholarship on Thornton Wilder, including three essays published here for the first time.

"Thornton Wilder: A Life brings readers face to face with the extraordinary man who made words come alive around the world, on the stage and on the page." —James Earl Jones, actor "Comprehensive and wisely fashioned….A splendid and long needed work." —Edward Albee, playwright Thornton Wilder—three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, creator of such enduring stage works as Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and beloved novels like Bridge of San Luis Ray and Theophilus North—was much more than a pivotal figure in twentieth century American theater and literature. He was a world-traveler, a student, a teacher, a soldier, an actor, a son, a brother, and a complex, intensely private man who kept his personal life a secret. In Thornton Wilder: A Life, author Penelope Niven pulls back the curtain to present a fascinating, three-dimensional portrait one of America's greatest playwrights, novelists, and literary icons.

The essays in this volume evolved from papers presented at the Second International Thornton Wilder Conference, held at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, in June 2015. They examine Wilder’s work as both playwright and novelist, focusing upon how he drew on the collaborative mode of creativity required in the theatre, when writing both drama and fiction. The book’s authors use the term “collaboration” in its broadest sense, at times in response to Wilder’s critics who faulted him for “borrowing” from other, earlier, literary works rather than recognizing these “borrowings” as central to the artistic process of collaboration. In exploring Wilder’s collaborative efforts of different kinds, the essays not only consider how Wilder worked with and revised earlier literary texts and the ideas central to those texts, but also analyze how Wilder worked with and inspired other creative individuals and how recent productions of Wilder’s plays, both in the US and abroad, have been the products of unique forms of collaboration.

Thornton Wilder had a gift for framing random and ordinary moments of life, an effect he perfected for his audiences. This volume gathers together some of the most respected criticism on the author's work. Examined texts include Our Town and The

The new essays in this collection, on such diverse writers as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Maurine Dallas Watkins, Sophie Treadwell, and Washington Irving, fill an important conceptual gap. The essayists offer numerous approaches to intertextuality: the influence of the poetry of romanticism and Shakespeare and of histories and novels, ideological and political discourses on American playwrights, unlikely connections between such writers as Miller and Wilder, the problems of intertexts in translation, the evolution in historical and performance contexts of the same tale, and the relationships among feminism, the drama of the courtroom, and the drama of the stage. Intertextuality has been an under-explored area in studies of dramatic and performance texts. The innovative findings of these scholars testify to the continuing vitality of research in American drama and performance.

Thornton Wilder, three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, remains to many people an enigma. Malcolm Cowley indicated that "in point of intelligent criticism, Wilder is the most neglected author of a brilliant generation," and the Times Literary Supplement once observed that "Thornton Wilder has successfully resisted any kind of classification as a novelist or playwright." In this revealing, incisive study, Amos Wilder, Thornton's older brother, seeks to situate his brother's vision and art. Much criticism, dominated my modernist canons, has not known what to do with Thornton Wilder and finds suspect his wide popularity and what is seen as his traditionalist or "mid-brow" outlook informed by "Puritan" antecedents and rearing. The present essay, however, documents Wilder's full initiation into the "modern" experience, only insisting that he absorbed its iconoclasms into a deeper and more universal humanism. Critical circles, in their view of the American Writer in our day, commonly neglect and disparage those legacies, cultural and religious, which shaped Wilder's outlook. Therefore, the central section of this essay is devoted to biographical detail, illustrating those creative factors and faiths that undergird American society and its promise. Many readers will be aided in their understanding of Wilder by this book's description of the special circumstances of his education, formative influences, and family life. Thornton Wilder and His Public offers rare, intimately informed, and helpful illumination on the life and art of one of America's greatest literary figures.