Thornton Wilder: A Life

by Penelope Niven, Edward Albee (Foreword)

"Thornton 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 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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Theatre

869 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 27, 2012

About the author

Penelope Niven is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of poet Carl Sandburg and photographer Edward Steichen. Her books include CARL SANDBURG: A BIOGRAPHY; STEICHEN: A BIOGRAPHY; VOICES AND SILENCES, co-authored with the actor James Earl Jones, and praised as a classic on acting; and SWIMMING LESSONS, a memoir. Her Steichen biography has just been translated into Chinese. CARL SANDBURG: ADVENTURES OF A POET, her biography for children, was awarded an International Reading Association Prize "for exceptionally distinguished literature for children," one of six books honored among publications from 99 countries. She is presently working on a biography of Thornton Wilder, to be published in 2012 by HarperCollins.

She has been awarded two honorary doctorates, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Thornton Wilder Visiting Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, among other honors. She received the North Carolina Award in Literature, the highest honor the state bestows on an author. During the past twenty years she has lectured across the United States and in Switzerland, Canada and Wales, and has served as an editor for various publications and a consultant for television films on Sandburg, Jones, and Steichen. She has recently retired after twelve years as Writer-in-Residence at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Penelope Niven is the mother of award-winning author Jennifer Niven (THE ICE MASTER; ADA BLACKJACK: A TRUE STORY OF SURVIVAL IN THE ARCTIC; VELVA JEAN LEARNS TO DRIVE; THE AQUA-NET DIARIES; and VELVA JEAN LEARNS TO FLY.)

Reviews

[Quo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penelope Niven's 2012 biography, Thornton Wilder, a Life, adds considerably to the reading of the author's prose, including The Bridge at San Luis Rey, a novel I've recently reread for a library book discussion.


Reading about Wilder's life proved timely, as I am in the midst of preparing to read an essay on Chicagoan Robert Ardrey, author, screenwriter & playwright, with a focus on his book African Genesis, Thornton Wilder having served as Ardrey's mentor while the latter taught creative writing at the University of Chicago, with their relationship lifelong.

Thornton Wilder led a rather peripatetic life, having spent part of his childhood in the early part of the 20th century at a boarding school in China where his father had been posted. He became intensely curious about China, though the curriculum was focused almost exclusively on the study of European history & languages, including German, French & Latin. As his biographer put it: Wilder was "surrounded by the enigmas of the ancient, richly complex culture of China, yet denied the tools & the vocabulary that could help him to understand it."

Wilder apparently "loved, revered & at times feared his father, while he adored his emotionally exhausted & frequently geographically distant mother." The family was often separated for long periods due to fears about safety in China, among other factors & it seems that Wilder longed to have his family reunited.


Interestingly, Wilder considered himself a "twinless-twin", his twin brother having died just after birth, becoming psychologically a kind of missing link within his life and occasionally figuring in the author's prose, as with the twins who were characters in The Bridge at San Luis Rey, with one of the twins perishing on the iconic bridge.

Having been born in Wisconsin when his father briefly ran a newspaper in Madison, Wilder's 7 year period teaching at the University of Chicago, just after winning his first Pulitzer Prize, came as a reconnection with Midwestern landscapes of his earliest childhood and he particularly enjoyed the campus architecture, the proximity to Lake Michigan & his students. According to Niven, "there was probably no city he loved more than Chicago when in lived there during the 1930s. Well beyond that, Wilder had a deep & abiding interest in being American, confessing that he dearly missed it when abroad for too long a period.

Wilder was educated at Oberlin & Yale and he traveled around the world, spending time in Paris, Rome, Zurich & particularly enjoying his stays in Germany. Throughout Wilder's fiction, his plays included, he seemed to explore the fabric of everyday life while his characters evoked great wonder about its meaning. Thus, Bro. Juniper spends 6 years exploring the nature of the 5 lives cut short by the bridge failure in Peru, hoping to test his belief in God in a more scientific manner.


In Thornton Wilder's 1938 play, Our Town, we are taken to the small town of Grover's Corner,New Hampshire and treated to the everyday lives of those who live & die there. As Wilder put it:

Our town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village or as a speculation about the condition of life or death. It is an attempt to find value above all for the smallest events in our life. I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimension of time & place. The recurrent words in this play (& few have noticed it) are "hundreds", "thousands" & "millions".

Engagingly, the stage manager is a primary force within Our Town, serving as commentator to link the various scenes. Frank Craven filled this role in the 1938 Broadway production but among those who have later performed it are Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, Spalding Gray, Hal Holbrook, Paul Newman, Helen Hunt & Thornton Wilder himself.

There have been television & film versions (the latter with original music by Aaron Copeland), a musical based on the play and even an operatic rendering by Ned Rorem. Our Town continues to be performed around the world, including many high school productions & I've seen the play several times, including David Cromer's production in New York.

Thornton Wilder also gave the world the character of Dolly Levi in his play, The Matchmaker, with the figure of Dolly later becoming the source of the celebrated musical, Hello Dolly.

Throughout his life, Thornton Wilder remained a private man. As his biographer put it: "Wilder kept to himself his own hereditary ghosts, his dreams & his appetites, making his disclosures--if he disclosed anything at all--in his novels, plays & essays." As an example, "Wilder's private writings suggest sexual constraint, repression, sublimation & at times, self-imposed celibacy". However, he left no definitive answers within his journals about his own sexual proclivities.


Throughout his life Thornton Wilder continued to probe his own life for background material for his plays, novels & essays, as he explored changing literary landscapes, spending extensive time coming to grips with James Joyce, Thomas Mann and French Jesuit writer-paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin but also the Beatles and pop culture.

There is a suggestion that biographer Penelope Niven & Thornton Wilder share some common ancestry, though they never met. In any case, I found her book of considerable interest & recommend it to anyone keen to learn more about this major American writer.

*Within my review are several images of Thornton Wilder + that of director David Cromer within his own production of Our Town. **The biography includes 16 pages of photos, taken from the life of Thornton Wilder & his family + an introductory comment by Edward Albee.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to teach "Our Town" and "The Matchmaker" (which became "Hello, Dolly.") My students seemed to enjoy reading both. Then my grandson Harrison was in "Our Town" at his high school and I went to see it with the family and enjoyed it.
So when I saw there was a new bio of Wilder I thought it would be interesting to know more about him: his family, his education, the sources of his creativity.
Wilder was remarkably well educated. Fluent in Latin, French,German and Italian, he knew the Greek classics and read widely from many cultures, and was especially influenced by Lope de Vega. He was well traveled. He knew everyone who was anyone: Gertrude Stein, Alex Woolcott. He served in both World Wars, taught at the University of Chicago, lectured at Harvard, traveled for the State Department. There is constant tension between his love of social activity and his need to be alone to think and write. I have always thought of him as a playwright, but he wrote several prize-winning novels.
Because of the abundance of letters Ms. Niven had to draw on there is a clear picture of his family: his domineering father and his supportive mother, and his equally talented siblings. Despite that abundance, people's curiosity about romance and or sex in his life will not be completely satisfied and there is mystery surrounding the disappearance of some of his sister Charlotte's writings.

[Kit Simpson · Rating 5 out of 5]

the saga is over!! loved this, love tw

[Rick Rapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thornton Wilder was a fascinating man: a teacher, traveler, linguist, and, of course, a gifted writer. He was also pathologically private. For someone who was so involved in so many people's lives, it seems few if any people really knew him…he guarded his privacy ferociously and spent long periods of time alone. That being the case, Niven explores many facets of Wilder's life and personality. She reports on all major (and several minor) events in Wilder's life. But I never could shake the feeling of tedium that her writing provoked in me. I continued to plod through this lengthy tome, but it never held the satisfaction of some of the other biographies I have read (and thoroughly enjoyed.)

[David Radavich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Penelope Niven's biography of Thornton Wilder is masterful. A big book, it nonetheless reads comfortably and with good pacing. It covers everything without laboring too much on one topic or another. She discusses his private life with discretion and airs controversies without dwelling too much or taking sides. Wilder comes across as an incredible cosmopolitan, perhaps the greatest America has produced, a man of high standards, encompassing thought, and genial personality.

[Clifford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book after seeing a production of Our Town that reminded me how much I enjoyed Wilder's work when I was younger, having first read The Bridge of San Luis Rey as a schoolboy. This biography reveals in great detail Wilder's life and writing process, and I'm very happy to have read it.

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just couldn't get interested and had to give up on this one.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are of a certain generation you probably saw the play “Our “Town” performed in high school. It was for a time ubiquitous. Its minimal staging requirements and universal truths about family and death made it a popular choice. Its author, Thornton Wilder, won a Pulitzer Prize for it as well as the novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” making him the first American to win in both the drama and fiction categories. This popular author who died in 1975 has been the subject before of biographies but Penelope Niven was the first biographer to have access to papers that had been withheld by a sister who had hoped to use them for her own Wilder biography.
Wilder’s father Amos was a Wisconsin newspaper editor who entered the foreign service as a counsel in China in the early 1900s. Perennially strapped for cash, he felt his growing children would be better served by schooling at private schools elsewhere. Biographer Nevin deserves a medal for piercing together the shifting locations of the two sons and three daughters through the weekly letters the children sent their father. The youngest daughter stayed with the mother who left China for the United States citing nerves and exhaustion. The father, Amos Sr., comes across as a well-meaning but hovering parent who constantly worried his children about money and their moral upbringing. Niven notes that four of the five children including Thornton were cursed with intimacy issues throughout their lives long after the father had passed. This provides a believable explanation as to why Thornton Wilder‘s letters and journals lack any mention of personal intimate relationships. Thornton Wilder lead a life of struggle as an extrovert trying to please everyone and an introvert trying to find time to write. He took the latter to extremes by vacationing for two years in a small town in Arizona just so he could write uninterrupted.
Even though I found some of Wilder’s philosophical ponderings hard to follow, his life story provided a welcome glimpse into theatre and publishing in the 20th Century. Thornton Wilder comes across as a brilliant, amiable artist. Recommended.

[Kev Willoughby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it was simply "Our Town" alone that compelled me to read this biography, I also enjoyed reading about so many other works by Wilder and particularly how his life experiences at the time of each creation had such an influence on his work. This is easily the most thorough biography I have ever read. Though it seemed repetitive and in need of editing (especially in the early chapters where each year of Wilder's life seemed like deja vu, particularly during each summer), I appreciate the immense research by Ms. Niven because the resulting tone is authentic, allowing her to accurately convey Wilder's struggles to prioritize family while also asserting himself as an individual and then later as an international icon of the 20th century.

Reading Wilder's story makes me want to be more dedicated to consistent writing, because it was his persistence (along with his social skills) that led to so many of the opportunities that made his success possible. And even after enjoying a great deal of success and recognition, it was interesting that he still struggled, at times, with confidence and discouragement. Yet even when he felt low, he continued to work to develop his abilities and he left quite a legacy as a writer.

[Kim Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This thorough, indulgently documented biography provides a deep analysis of Wilder’s contributions to American writing, both dramatic and long fiction. The reader will gain new respect for this singularly American author.

Niven refuses to be drawn into speculation about certain elements of his private life that are not evidenced by reliable sources (i.e. sexuality). She considers the vague testimony and dismisses it as an intrusion on his well-deserved privacy.

[Pam Lobley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was long and well-researched which can sometimes mean tedious, but I loved it! It was such a clear and fascinating look at his life. He was a teacher and lecturer most of his life along with producing those wonderful plays and novels. Very inspirational.

[Marjorie Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary life! The man who wrote Our Town grew up in China, lived all over the world, each play a completely different challenge to ordinary awareness. Niven's research and writing are absolutely brilliant.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 4 out of 5]

An in-depth biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wisconsin-born novelist and playwright, showing how his life formulated his philosophy, and how his philosophy formed his writing.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read this because Our Town is my favorite play of all time. I really loved the first half of this dense but readable book. The story of Wilder's early life and his family was compelling and it included a micro-managing father, time spent in China as a boy, and a mother and siblings of great talent. It was a loving if somewhat dysfunctional family and the author's access to many thousands of pages of Wilder's letters, journals and work helped her tell Wilder's story with accuracy and gave weight to her thoughts about what can't be known. As the book went on, there was less narrative and more commentary and dissection of Wilder's works and I found it less interesting. For readers who are very interested in what shaped Wilder's views of life.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although reading such a tome is an undertaking in a day and age when there are so many demands and distractions, I thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to finish. Niven did a wonderful job in selecting fascinating bits of correspondence from the copious amounts Wilder wrote in his lifetime, and every bit of it contained salient details that added to the complete picture of who Wilder was -- no distracting trivia here. I can't help but want to reread all of Wilder's works now, since most of them were read during high school. After reading this biography, I think I would only appreciate them even more than I did back then.

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never given Thornton Wilder much thought, but this book did an amazing job of telling me everything there is to know about him. I've made notes to go back and read some of his plays and novels. Though there were heartbreaking moments in his peripatetic family life, he turned these into wise observations about human nature. Penelope Niven makes a very long biography interesting all the way.

[Warren Adler · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exhaustive, somewhat over detailed study of the external and internal life of a beloved, prize winning American writer, who won extraordinary contemporary fame for his plays and novels. What keeps alive his literary star is the enduring “Our Town” a play that continues to resonate with people all over the world for its emotional exploration of small town life in America.

[Amy Wright]

An engrossing portrait of an artist. Drawing from family letters and journals, the book illuminates, with psychological sensitivity and a storyteller's skill, the development of the kind, funny, and reflective man who is best known for “Our Town.”

[Ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, powerful. A masterful biography of a profound writer.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this. Wilder is a fascinating subject, and Niven obviously has a great affection for him.

[Paul Gabbard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit of a commitment but it gets good towards the second half of the book