The Bridge of San Luis Rey (15 page)

About the Author

In his quiet way, Thornton Niven Wilder was a revolutionary writer who experimented boldly with literary forms and themes, from the beginning to the end of his long career. “Every novel is different from the others,” he wrote when he was seventy-five. “The theater (ditto). . . . The thing I'm writing now is again totally unlike anything that preceded it.” Wilder's richly diverse settings, characters, and themes are at once specific and global. Deeply immersed in classical as well as contemporary literature, he often fused the traditional and the modern in his novels and plays, all the while exploring the cosmic in the commonplace. In a January 12, 1953, cover story,
Time
took note of Wilder's unique “interplanetary mind”—his ability to write from a vision that was at once American and universal.

A pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century letters, Wilder was a novelist and playwright whose works continue to be widely read and produced in this new century. He is the only writer to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction and Drama. His second novel,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, received the Fiction award in 1928, and he won the prize twice in Drama, for
Our Town
in 1938 and
The Skin of Our Teeth
in 1943. His other novels are
The Cabala, The Woman of Andros, Heaven's My Destination, The Ides of March, The Eighth Day
, and
Theophilus North
. His other major dramas include
The Matchmaker
, which was adapted as the internationally acclaimed musical comedy
Hello, Dolly!
, and
The Alcestiad
. Among his innovative shorter plays are
The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
and
The Long Christmas Dinner
, and two uniquely conceived series,
The Seven Ages of Man
and
The Seven Deadly Sins
, frequently performed by amateurs.

Wilder and his work received many honors, highlighted by the three Pulitzer Prizes, the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Order of Merit (Peru), the Goethe-Plakette der Stadt (Germany, 1959), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963), the National Book Committee's first National Medal for Literature (1965), and the National Book Award for Fiction (1967).

He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, to Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder. The family later lived in China and in California, where Wilder was graduated from Berkeley High School. After two years at Oberlin College, he went on to Yale, where received his undergraduate degree in 1920. A valuable part of his education took place during summers spent working hard on farms in California, Kentucky, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. His father arranged these rigorous “shirtsleeve” jobs for Wilder and his older brother, Amos, as part of their initiation into the American experience.

Thornton Wilder studied archaeology and Italian as a special student at the American Academy in Rome (1920–1921), and earned a master of arts degree in French literature at Princeton in 1926.

In addition to his talents as playwright and novelist, Wilder was an accomplished teacher, essayist, translator, scholar, lecturer, librettist, and screenwriter. In 1942, he teamed with Alfred Hitchcock to write the first draft of the screenplay for the classic thriller
Shadow of a Doubt
, receiving credit as principal writer and a special screen credit for his “contribution to the preparation” of the production. All but fluent in four languages, Wilder translated and adapted plays by such varied authors as Henrik Ibsen, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Obey. As a scholar, he conducted significant research on James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
and the plays of Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega.

Wilder's friends included a broad spectrum of figures on both sides of the Atlantic—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Alexander Woollcott, Gene Tunney, Sigmund Freud, producer Max Reinhardt, Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Wilder was especially close to Gertrude Stein and became one of her most effective interpreters and champions. Many of Wilder's friendships are documented in his prolific correspondence. Wilder believed that great letters constitute a “great branch of literature.” In a lecture entitled “On Reading the Great Letter Writers,” he wrote that a letter can function as a “literary exercise,” the “profile of a personality,” and “news of the soul,” apt descriptions of thousands of letters he wrote to his own friends and family.

Wilder enjoyed acting and played major roles in several of his own plays in summer theater productions. He also possessed a lifelong love of music: reading musical scores was a hobby, and he wrote the librettos for two operas based on his work:
The Long Christmas Dinner
, with composer Paul Hindemith; and
The Alcestiad
, with composer Louise Talma. Both works premiered in Germany.

Teaching was one of Wilder's deepest passions. He began his teaching career in 1921 as an instructor in French at Lawrenceville, a private secondary school in New Jersey. Financial independence after the publication of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
permitted him to leave the classroom in 1928, but he returned to teaching in the 1930s at the University of Chicago. For six years, on a part-time basis, he taught courses there in classics in translation, comparative literature, and composition. In 1950–1951, he served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Wilder's gifts for scholarship and teaching (he treated the classroom as all but a theater) made him a consummate, much-sought-after lecturer in his own country and abroad. After World War II, he held special standing, especially in Germany, as an interpreter of his own country's intellectual traditions and their influence on cultural expression.

During World War I, Wilder had served a three-month stint as an enlisted man in the Coast Artillery section of the army, stationed at Fort Adams, Rhode Island. He volunteered for service in World War II, advancing to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Army Air Force Intelligence. For his service in North Africa and Italy, he was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, the Chevalier Legion d'Honneur, and honorary officership in the Military Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.).

From royalties received from
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, Wilder built a house for his family in 1930 in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven. But he typically spent as many as two hundred days a year away from Hamden, traveling to and settling in a variety of places that provided the stimulation and solitude he needed for his work. Sometimes his destination was the Arizona desert, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, or Martha's Vineyard, Newport, Saratoga, Vienna, or Baden-Baden. He wrote aboard ships, and often chose to stay in “spas in off-season.” He needed a certain refuge when he was deeply immersed in writing a novel or play. Wilder explained his habit to a
New Yorker
journalist in 1959: “The walks, the quiet—all the elegance is present, everything is there but the people. That's it! A spa in off-season! I make a practice of it.”

But Wilder always returned to “the house
The Bridge
built,” as it is still known to this day. He died there of a heart attack on December 7, 1975.

 

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Books by Thornton Wilder

Novels

The Cabala and the Woman of Andros

Heaven's My Destination

The Ides of March

The Eighth Day

Theophilus North

 

Collections of Short Plays

The Angel That Troubled the Waters

The Long Christmas Dinner & Other Plays in One Act

 

Plays

Our Town

The Merchant of Yonkers

The Skin of Our Teeth

The Matchmaker

The Alcestiad

 

Essays

American Characteristics & Other Essays

The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961

Copyright

A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1927 by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. It is reprinted here by arrangement with the Wilder Family LLC.

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY
. Copyright 1927 by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1955 by Thornton Wilder. Copyright © 2002 by the Wilder Family LLC. Foreword copyright © 2003 by Russell Banks. Afterword copyright © 2003 by Tappan Wilder. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

Hardcover reissue published 2004.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0-06-058061-5
Epub Edition © FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780062232724

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