Thornton Wilder is greatly under-estimated and under-appreciated today. His play are remarkable in their form and dramaturgy but curiously influenced European theater far more than American theater (Durrenmatt, my favorite playwright, was influenced by Wilder). And he's our ONLY writer to win Pulitzers for both fiction and drama.
Wilder and the Lost Generation
On this day in 1975 Thornton Wilder died, at the age of seventy-eight. Wilder is the only person to receive Pulitzer Prizes for both literature (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927) and drama (Our Town, 1938; The Skin of Our Teeth, 1943). Add his The Merchant of Yonkers (evolved to The Matchmaker, then Hello, Dolly) to the list and it becomes clear what critics such as Edmund Wilson are talking about: "Wilder occupies a unique position, between the Great Books and Parisian sophistication one way, and the entertainment industry the other way, and in our culture this region, though central, is a dark and almost uninhabited no man's land." Which is to say that while most of Wilder's contemporaries were building their reputations upon Lost Generation despair, he went his own popular, warm-hearted, life-affirming way. |
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