![]() ![]() (the famed locale of "Our Town") or the interior of the house that Wilder built for his family in Connecticut. Niven takes time to tell readers the number of passengers in three classes on an ocean liner but fails to provide detailed interior descriptions of either the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. Which makes it all the more curious that what is missing is a sense of place. At more than 800 pages, it is too long, and the reading can be ponderous, including every minor detail. That this biography is meticulously researched is undeniable and is, at times, a fault. ![]() (Curiously, she does not liberally quote Wilder's letters to Steward, which are stored in the Yale archives, yet have not been published.) A minor literary figure and provocateur named Samuel Steward publicly "outed" the playwright after Wilder's death, and Niven weighs the evidence, which she deems inconclusive. Unlike such other works as "The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder," this biography does not skirt the question of Wilder's sexuality, and Niven addresses the subject gingerly and respectfully. Several times, she sums up his work as a series of questions: "How do we live? How do we love? How do we cope? How do we bear the unbearable?" While Niven is clear that her book is not a work of literary criticism, she does chronicle the progress of Wilder's prose and plays, giving an almost day-by-day account of his writing and his pioneering experimentation with time and place. I merely hate to be in groups of over four." Despite this roster of intimate friendships, he described himself in his later life as "a growly-smily grouching-chuckling old humbug curmudgeon," adding, "I don't hate people. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ruth Gordon, Sigmund Freud, to name just a few. He was also a loner whose list of friends reads like a Who's Who of 20th century literature and culture: Ernest Hemingway, F. He was a teacher at various prep schools and universities, even though his friends told him, "Never teach." He traveled the world yet yearned for home. Given his peripatetic childhood, Wilder's later life is full of seeming contradictions. He was shaped from an early age by his father's constant criticism: In letters quoted throughout the biography, the older man says his son "lacks application" and "needs a little virility." In his father's eyes, Wilder was "ensitive" and "elf-conscious," even "hopeless," especially when it came to finances. Niven, who has chronicled the lives of poet Carl Sandburg and photographer Edward Steichen, digs deep into the voluminous stock of letters, journals, and manuscripts in the Wilder family archives to produce this portrait. The winner of three Pulitzer Prizes (two for drama, one for fiction) was an intensely private man.īut the curtain on his personal life is lifted in Penelope Niven's prodigious biography "Thornton Wilder: A Life," which portrays a man who was conflicted by his simultaneous desire for solitude and companionship. ![]() But despite his longevity on stage and in classrooms, Wilder himself remains an enigma. His novel, "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," was once required reading, and almost 75 years after its debut, his masterpiece, "Our Town," remains one of the most produced American plays of all time. ![]() Playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder is a familiar figure to anyone who has ever watched a clock tick in an American high school. William Tague/williamstown theatre festival/William Tague “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder (above: a 1959 production) remains one of the most produced American plays. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |