Thornton Wilder was born in
Madison, Wisconsin, in 1897. He attended
Oberlin College in Ohio and then transferred to Yale University,
graduating in 1920. After spending a year
in Rome, he took a job teaching French at a prep school in New Jersey
and started writing on the side. Wilder published his first novel, The
Cabala, in 1926, but his first real
taste of fame came when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The
Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927). The
royalties from this novel allowed him to quit his teaching job,
and he began to write full-time. Wilder quickly became a literary
celebrity, keeping company with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.
In the ideologically charged climate of the 1930s,
however, Wilder came under attack from critics who branded his work
escapist fare that refused to confront the gloomy reality of the
Depression. Hurt by this criticism and frustrated by the failure
of his 1934 novel Heaven’s My Destination,
Wilder turned to playwriting. Our Town, his most
celebrated dramatic effort, opened on Broadway in 1938 to
rave reviews. Audiences sensed the universality of the themes presented
in the play, which enabled virtually every theatergoer to participate
in the action onstage and identify with the characters. Our
Town eventually won Wilder his second Pulitzer Prize, and
went on to become one of the most performed American plays of the
twentieth century.
In many ways, Our Town is Wilder’s response
to his critics. Major works from other American writers of the time—notably Edgar
Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and Sherwood
Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—exposed the buried secrets,
hypocrisy, and oppression lurking beneath the surface of American
small town life. In Our Town, however, Wilder presents
a far more celebratory picture of a small town, the fictional hamlet
of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Wilder does not deny the fact
that the town suffers from social injustice and hypocrisy, and he
does not intend to idealize Grover’s Corners as a bastion of uncompromising
brotherly love. On the contrary, Wilder makes a point to include
in the play characters who criticize small town life, and Grover’s
Corners specifically. However, Wilder does not wish to denounce
the community simply because it contains some strains of hypocrisy.
Instead, he peers into Grover’s Corners in order to find lessons
about life in a world that contains both virtue and vice. He tenderly
tracks the residents’ day-to-day activities, their triumphs and
their sorrows, their casual conversations and their formal traditions—not
because he wants to praise New Hampshire, but because he wants to
praise humanity. Perhaps a political message in itself, Our
Town privileges the study of human life and its complexities
over blatantly political works that point fingers, stereotype others,
and otherwise divide people from one another.
Wilder’s principal message in Our Town—that
people should appreciate the details and interactions of everyday
life while they live them—became critical at a time when political
troubles were escalating in Europe. World War II was on the horizon
when the play hit theaters in 1938. It was
a time of tremendous international tension, and citizens across
the globe suffered from fear and uncertainty. Our Town directed
attention away from these negative aspects of life in the late 1930s
and focused instead on the aspects of the human experience that
make life precious. Wilder revealed his faith in the stability and
constancy of life through his depiction and discussion of the small
town of Grover’s Corners, with its “marrying . . . living and .
. . dying.”
The 1920s and 1930s
proved to be the heyday of Wilder’s career. He enlisted as a soldier
and served in Europe during World War II, and though he continued
his literary career upon his return to the United States, his output
decreased during the next two decades. A later effort to write a
novel, The Eighth Day (1967),
met with mixed reviews. Wilder died in December 1975 at
his home in Connecticut.
