Our town -- The skin of our teeth -- The matchmaker -- The Alcestiad -- The drunken sisters -- The marriage we deplore -- The unerring instinct -- Scenes from The emporium -- Plays for Bleecker Street -- The seven ages of man -- Writings on theater.

"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 story is based on a fictional disaster that occurred in Peru on July 20, 1714. A rope bridge woven by the Incas on the road between Lima and Cuzco collapsed when five people were crossing it. They all fell into the river from a great height and were killed. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar who was about to cross the bridge himself, witnessed the tragedy. Being deeply pious, he saw in what happened a possible divine providence. Did the dead deserve to have their lives cut short in such a terrible way? The monk tries to learn as much as he can about the five victims, finding and questioning people who knew them. As a result of years of investigation, he compiles a voluminous book with all the evidence he has gathered that the beginning and end of human life are part of God's plan... The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, and remains widely acclaimed as Wilder's most famous work. In 1998, the book was rated number 37 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library on the list of the 100 best 20th-century novels. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

A work of startling originality when it debuted in 1938, Thornton Wilder's Our Town evolved to be seen by some as a vintage slice of early 20th Century Americana, rather than being fully appreciated for its complex and eternal themes and its deceptively simple form. This unique and timely book shines a light on the play's continued impact in the 21st century and makes a case for the healing powers of Wilder's text to a world confronting multiple crises. Through extensive interviews with more than 100 artists about their own experience of the play and its impact on them professionally and personally – and including background on the play's early years and its pervasiveness in American culture – Another Day's Begun shows why this particular work remains so important, essential, and beloved. Every production of Our Town has a story to tell beyond Wilder's own. One year after the tragedy of 9/11, Paul Newman, in his final stage appearance, played the Stage Manager in Our Town on Broadway. Director David Cromer's 2008 Chicago interpretation would play in five more cities, ultimately becoming New York's longest-running Our Town ever. In 2013, incarcerated men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility brought Grover's Corners inside a maximum security prison. After the 2017 arena bombing in Manchester UK, the Royal Exchange Theatre chose Our Town as its offering to the stricken community. 80 years after it was written, more than 110 years after its actions take place, Our Town continues to assert itself as an essential play about how we must embrace and appreciate the value of life itself. Another Day's Begun explains how this American classic has the power to inspire, heal and endure in the modern day, onstage and beyond.

“[Wilder's] finest and most beautiful novel. . . . Spanning two continents and several generations, it begins as a murder mystery and goes on to tell a story, at once dramatic and philosophical, about the range of human courage, aspirations, steadfastness, weakness, defeat and victory.” — New York Post This beautiful edition of Thornton Wilder’s renowned National Book Award–winning novel features a foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on unique sources as Wilder’s unpublished letters, handwritten annotations, and other illuminating documentary material. At once a murder mystery and a philosophical tale, The Eighth Day is a “suspenseful and deeply moving” (New York Times) work of classic stature that has been hailed as a great American epic. Set in a mining town in southern Illinois, the novels centers around two families blasted apart when the patriarch of one family, John Ashley, is accused of murdering his best friend. Ashley's miraculous jailbreak on the eve of his execution and his subsequent flight to South America trigger a powerful story tracing the fates of all those whose lives are forever changed by the tragedy: Ashley himself, his wife and children, and the wife and children of the victim.

The first complete anthology of short stories by “the creator of the American short story”— includes the landmark collection Winesburg, Ohio (Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic) In the winter of 1912, Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) abruptly left his office and spent three days wandering through the Ohio countryside, a victim of “nervous exhaustion.” Over the next few years, abandoning his family and his business, he resolved to become a writer. Novels and poetry followed, but it was with the story collection Winesburg, Ohio that he found his ideal form, remaking the American short story for the modern era. Hart Crane, one of the first to recognize Anderson’s genius, quickly hailed his accomplishment: “America should read this book on her knees.” Here—for the first time in a single volume—are all the collections Anderson published during his lifetime: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933), along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. Exploring the hidden recesses of small-town life, these haunting, understated, often sexually frank stories pivot on seemingly quiet moments when lives change, futures are recast, and pasts come to reckon. They transformed the tone of American storytelling, inspiring writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer, and defining a tradition of midwestern fiction that includes Charles Baxter, editor of this volume. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Often compared to the works of E.E. Cummings and Elizabeth Bishop, these poems are a free-ranging exploration of outer and inner worlds, of nature and the human mind In celebration of the centenary of May Swenson’s birth, The Library of America presents a one-volume edition of all of the poems that Swenson published in her lifetime—from her first collection Another Animal (1954) to the innovative shaped poems of Iconographs (1970) to her final work In Other Words (1987)—as well as a selection of previously uncollected work. The collection reveals the sweeping compass of Swenson’s curiosity: nature poems display her keen observation of wildlife; exuberant and erotic love poems celebrate beauty and passion; place poems record her travels to the American Southwest, France, and Italy and her residence in New York City and Sea Cliff, Long Island; verse “analyses” investigate baseball, wave motion, the DNA molecule, bronco busting, James Bond movies, and the first walk on the moon. Swenson was an inveterate reviser: poems in earlier volumes were frequently reworked for inclusion in later volumes, such as To Mix with Time (1963) and New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978). While preserving the order of publication, this volume presents the author’s final or definitive version. Substantive textual variants and title changes are detailed in the notes to the volume. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.