The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder »

One of America's most acclaimed and beloved writers, Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his acclaimed novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and his full-length dramas Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. Wilder's numerous other honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.

This volume of more than three hundred letters, selected from some seven thousand gathered around the world, is the first to provide a comprehensive collection of Thornton Wilder's correspondence. Wilder was known as a man who knew everybody, and these letters vividly document the range of his friendships. Readers will find him roller-skating with Walt Disney, attending an inaugural reception for FDR at the White House, describing his life as a soldier in two World Wars, mentoring younger writers, dining out with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, and savoring his association with colorful local citizens during his twenty-month stay as a self-styled "hermit" in an Arizona mining town.

Through Wilder's correspondence, readers can eavesdrop on his conversations with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein. Noël Coward, Max Reinhardt, Gene Tunney, Alexander Woollcott, Laurence Olivier, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, Aaron Copeland, Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, and Mia Farrow. Equally absorbing are Wilder's intimate letters to his family.

The author of such classics as Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder was a born storyteller and dramatist; we see that talent emerging in scenes and incidental dialogue in his letters. With characteristic exuberance, he draws on his vast reservoir of learning and his incessant reading to inform, encourage, instruct, and entertain. In this collection, Thornton Wilder speaks for himself in his own unique, enduring voice.

Publishers Weekly

Wilder and Bryer provide considerable insight into a protean American novelist and playwright. As a man of the theater, Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is not typically counted among experimentalists. Yet Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth are works of high modernism. This essential gathering of letters, carefully edited and abundantly annotated by independent historian Wilder (the writer's niece by marriage) and Bryer (editor of Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill), indicates a man of sophistication, immense energy yet with a curious detachment. He was at home with classical, Far Eastern and 20th-century literature as well as popular culture. In this generous selection, Wilder's abiding friendships from the worlds of literature and the arts count, among many others, Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Max Reinhardt, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Mia Farrow. Like the best collections of correspondence in the hands of sensitive editors, this one peels away the quotidian to reveal the underlying personality of its subject. 38 b&w photos. (Oct. 7)

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List of Illustrations

Foreword Scott Donaldson Donaldson, Scott

Introduction

Pt. 1 Beginnings: 1909-920 1

Pt. 2 Bridges: 1920-1929 125

Pt. 3 Roles: 1929-1939 229

Pt. 4 War and After: 1939-1949 355

Pt. 5 Honors: 1950-1960 479

Pt. 6 Journeys: 1961-1975 581

Index 707