Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  22. John E. Pember, “Thornton Wilder No Slave to His Work; Drops Everything and Takes a Rest Whenever He Feels Like It,” Boston Herald Magazine, March 31, 1929, 2; reprinted in Bryer, Conversatioins with Thornton Wilder, 3–8.

  23. TNW to Lee Keedick, April 11, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  24. TNW to Lee Keedick, April 19, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  25. Ibid.

  26. TNW to Lee Keedick, December 19, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  27. Some passages about The Woman of Andros were first published in my foreword to TNW’s The Cabala and The Woman of Andros, xi–xxv. All citations of The Woman of Andros refer to this edition.

  28. TNW to Isabel Wilder, September 27, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  29. TNW to Lee Keedick, November 23, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  30. TNW to Isabel Wilder, September 27, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  31. Ibid.

  32. TNW to Isabel Wilder, October 7, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  33. TNW to Isabel Wilder, September 27, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  34. TNW to Sybil Colefax, November 24, 1929, New York University.

  35. Ibid.

  36. TNW to Albert Boni, January 23, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  37. Frederick James Smith, “Wilder and Wilder: Mlle. Damita Torches Up the Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Liberty, April 27, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL. Liberty, a weekly magazine with a circulation of three million, was one of the most popular magazines in the United States during the twenties and thirties.

  38. TNW to Mrs. Coker, c/o the X.X.M.D. Study Club, St. Joseph, Missouri, December 15, 1947, Private Collection.

  39. TNW, 1929 Journal, Entries 71–72, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  40. Other playwrights who adapted Terence’s comedy were Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers, in 1722; and Daniel Bellamy, The Perjured Devotee, in 1739.

  41. This passage is adapted from my foreword to The Woman of Andros, xxi–xxii.

  42. TNW, 1929 Journal, Entry 73, TNW Collection, YCAL. TNW to Norman Fitts, SL, 240–41.

  43. TNW, 1929 Journal, Entry 73.

  44. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, July 24, 1929, SL, 237–40.

  45. TNW, The Cabala and The Woman of Andros, 137.

  46. Ibid., 184.

  47. Ibid., 150–51.

  48. Ibid., 179.

  49. Ibid., 176.

  50. Ibid., 197.

  51. Ibid., 148–50.

  52. Ibid., 197.

  53. TNW, 1929 Journal, Entry 77, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  54. Ibid.

  55. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, February 20, 1930, SL, 246–47.

  56. Ibid.

  57. TNW to Lee Keedick, December 19, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  58. Lee Keedick to TNW, telegram, January 7, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  59. TNW to Lee Keedick, telegram, January 9, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  60. “The Future of American Literature,” University of Iowa brochure, 1930, Private Collection.

  61. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, February 20, 1930, SL, 246–47.

  21: “VARIETY, VARIETY” (1930S)

  1. TNW, “CHRONOLOGY,” n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL. (The list ends at 1952.)

  2. Ibid.

  3. Advertisement, Saturday Review of Literature, March 15, 1930.

  4. Wilson, “The Critic Who Does Not Exist,” Shores of Light, 369. For reference to Gold’s intelligence, see Wilson, “Dos Passos and the Social Revolution,” Shores of Light, 433.

  5. TNW was just one target of what the critic Joan Acocella calls “the politicizing of criticism in the thirties,” along with Willa Cather, William Faulkner, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others. Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 2002), 24–29.

  6. Michael Gold, “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ,” New Republic, October 22, 1930.

  7. “I kept to one issue with Mike,” Carl Sandburg wrote Archibald MacLeish October 6, 1933. “I had to hold in because I have Mike’s number from so many directions.” Sandburg had written for left-wing publications, and for a time lent his name to the masthead of Gold’s New Masses.

  8. Edmund Wilson, “The Literary Class War,” New Republic, May 4, 1932; reprinted in Shores of Light, 534–39.

  9. TNW to Lee Keedick, November 23, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  10. TNW to Sybil Colefax, November 24, 1929, New York University.

  11. TNW to William Prohme, “Wilder vs. His Critics,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 5, 1933. See also, for Hawaii lecture coverage, “Author Finds Hawaii to His Liking,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 2, 1933; TNW to Clifford Gessler, “Wilder Talks on the Novel: Novelist Tells How Literature Gives Coherence to Chaotic World,” November 10, 1933 [one of Wilder’s lecture topics in Hawaii was “Some Thoughts on the Novel”]; TNW to Edna B. Lawson, “Wilder Predicts Drama as Form of American Literary Expression,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 17, 1933; “Wilder Talks on the Drama: Theater May Be on the Eve of Great Era, Says Author in Closing Lecture,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 17, 1933.

  12. TNW to Sybil Colefax, November 2, 1932, SL, 255–59.

  13. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, July 24, 1929, SL, 237–40.

  14. TNW to Dr. —Bridges, July 31, 1929, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  15. For background on Robert Maynard Hutchins, see Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Harry S. Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

  16. TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder, (Spring 1930?), TNW Collection, YCAL.

  17. TNW to Isabella Niven and APW, February 2, 1932, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  18. Isabella Niven Wilder to Dwight Dana, May 7, 1931, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  19. Dwight Dana to TNW, September 10, 1931, carbon copy, Private Collection.

  20. Dwight Dana to TNW, October 13, 1931, carbon copy, Private Collection.

  21. TNW to Dwight Dana, November 2, 1931, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  22. Ibid.

  23. TNW to Family, May 5, 1931, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  24. TNW to Edward Sheldon, August 7, 1933, SL, 262–66.

  25. TNW, preface to Three Plays (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), xxv. This volume contains the texts of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker.

  26. Ibid.

  27. The Long Christmas Dinner was produced in November 1931 in New Haven by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar College Philalethesis, for instance, and Pullman Car Hiawatha was staged at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in March 1932. That same month Queens of France graced the stage at Wilder’s mother’s alma mater, the Misses Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and the Hill School, Pottstown, Pennsylvania. For additional production and publishing details for these one-act plays, see Donald Gallup and A. Tappan Wilder, eds., The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997), vol. 1, 321–22.

  28. TNW, preface to Three Plays, xxx.

  29. TNW to Bob McCoy, “Thornton Wilder in Our Town,” San Juan Star, January 2, 1974; reprinted in Bryer, Conversations with Thornton Wilder, 110–15.

  30. TNW, Journal, Entry 80, June 27, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  31. Isabel Wilder, TS, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged manuscripts.

  32. TNW, The Cabala and The Woman of Andros, 134.

  33. TNW to Bill Nichols, [Summer 1932?], Nichols Papers, LC.

  34. TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, [1934?], YCAL.

  35. TNW to Isabel Wilder, May 1, 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL. Texas Guinan wrote to TNW on her distinctive letterhead, emblazoned with a map of Texas on the palm of a hand supporting the word “TEXAS” in bold black letters, with the “Guinan” arranged under the hand like a jewel-encrusted bracelet. She invited Wilder to visit her and offered to give a party for him, promising to do her best to entertain him. See Texas Guinan to TNW, June 25, 1930, TNW Collection, YCAL.

&
nbsp; 36. TNW to Dwight Dana, January 18, 1932, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  37. Also among TNW’s Chicago friends was the former University of Chicago student Martha Dodd (later Martha Dodd Stern), assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune. TNW exchanged a few flirtatious letters with Martha Dodd. She left Chicago in 1933 to accompany her father, William Dodd, to Germany, where he took up his post as U.S. ambassador in Berlin. Martha Dodd also wrote flirtatious letters to Chicagoan Carl Sandburg (thirty years older than she, and a friend of her father’s), and a number of other men over the years, sometimes giving the false impression, deliberately or otherwise, that there had been a full-fledged love affair.

  38. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, November 2, 1932, SL, 255–59.

  39. TNW to Edward Sheldon, August 7, 1933, SL, 262–66.

  40. Ibid.

  41. TNW to Ruth Gordon, June 18, 1933, Private Collection.

  42. TNW to Family, June 26, 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  43. Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator, 100.

  44. TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, [1934?], YCAL.

  45. Fanny Butcher, Many Lives—One Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 79.

  46. TNW to Isabel Wilder, May 1, 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  47. TNW to Ruth Gordon, June 18, 1933, Private Collection.

  48. TNW to Edward Sheldon, August 7, 1933, SL, 262–66.

  49. Ibid. Sadly, after her run at the fair, Guinan took her show on a Western tour and fell gravely ill. She died that November in Vancouver. She was forty-nine years old.

  50. TNW to Edward Sheldon, August 7, 1933, SL, 262–66.

  51. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, August 30, 1933, New York University.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Here, as elsewhere, I quote from or cite my foreword to The Cabala and The Woman of Andros, in this instance, from p. xxi.

  54. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, November 2, 1932, SL, 255–59.

  55. Ibid.

  56. TNW to Katharine Cornell, April 8, 1932 SL, 254–55.

  57. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, November 2, 1932, SL, 255–59.

  58. Katharine Cornell, I Wanted to Be an Actress: The Autobiography of Katharine Cornell (New York: Random House, 1938), 117–18.

  59. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, August 30, 1933, New York University.

  60. TNW to Ruth Gordon, June 18, 1933, Private Collection.

  61. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, August 30, 1933, New York University.

  22: “HOME” (1930S)

  1. TNW to Family, October 21, 1920. TNW Collection, YCAL.

  2. TNW, “A PREFACE FOR OUR TOWN,” New York Times, February 13, 1938. The preface is reprinted in TNW, Our Town (New York: HarperPerennial, 2003), as well as in TNW, American Characteristics; Tappan Wilder, The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, vol. 2; and McClatchy, Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater.

  3. TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, December 11, 1933, YCAL.

  4. APW to L. N. Flint, June 17, 1935, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  5. TNW to Isabel Wilder, [May 1931?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

  6. TNW to Leslie Glenn, July 15, 1932, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  7. TNW to Amy Wertheimer, [no day], 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  8. Dr. John Beebe to APW, March 30, 1935, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  9. Charlotte Wilder to APW, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters. (“December 1930” is written in another hand at the top of the letter.)

  10. Ibid.

  11. Charlotte Wilder to APW, [Summer 1933 or 1934, judging by return address: Christodora House, 147 Avenue B, New York], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  12. Janet Wilder Dakin, “Light and Shadow: An Autobiographical Sketch of My Childhood (1910–1923),” TS, headed, in JWD’s handwriting, “A talk I am giving today,” and dated February 22, 1982, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged manuscripts. Janet apparently sent her fifteen-page typescript to Isabel Wilder. In notes on the manuscript, Isabel not only corrected her sister’s memory of certain events, but challenged some of Janet’s personal reflections.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Janet Wilder Dakin to Tappan Wilder, March 13, 1978, Private Collection.

  16. Janet Wilder Dakin, “Light and Shadow: An Autobiographical Sketch of My Childhood.”

  17. TNW to Ruth Gordon, June 18, 1933, Private Collection.

  18. Janet Wilder to Family, February 6, 1938, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters. There is no record of her family’s response to Janet’s diet.

  19. Janet Wilder Dakin to Tappan Wilder, March 13, 1978, Private Collection.

  20. “A thoroughly American story”: Isabel Wilder to Charlotte Wilder, March 28, [1934?], TNW Collection, uncataloged papers. “Had a modest success”: ANW, “Isabel’s Writings,” June 4, 1987, ANW, Wilder Family Record, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  21. Isabel Wilder to Charlotte Wilder, [1933 or 1934?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  22. Charlotte Wilder to Isabel Wilder, [1940?; as Charlotte refers to her Guggenheim application, which was submitted on March 3 of that year], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  23. Charlotte Wilder to Isabella Niven Wilder, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters. (“March 1933” in Isabella’s hand.)

  24. Charlotte Wilder to APW, [from Yaddo, Summer 1933?], TNW Collection, uncataloged letters. During the summers of 1928 and 1929 Charlotte taught English and literature in the Barnard Summer School for Women Workers in Industry at Barnard College in New York City.

  25. APW to Charlotte Wilder, September 7, 1932, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  26. TNW to Charlotte Wilder, [September 3, 1933?], TNW Collection, YCAL. ANW received his Ph.D. at Yale in 1933. Isabel’s first novel was published in 1933. Charlotte Wilder went to Yaddo in 1933. She resigned her teaching post at Smith College in 1933 so that she could write full-time.

  27. See Robert Pollock to Charlotte Wilder, August 3, 1925, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  28. Charlotte Wilder to Ernestine Friedmann, n.d. and September 8, 1928, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters. Ernestine Friedmann to Charlotte Wilder, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  29. Charlotte Wilder to ANW, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters. (“1932,” written in ANW’s hand.)

  30. Charlotte Wilder, untitled manuscript, April 2, [1932?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged manuscript.

  31. Ibid.

  32. APW to Charlotte Wilder, February 8, [1930?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  33. Charlotte Wilder to ANW, [1932?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  34. ANW to Catharine Kerlin, January 17, 1935, Private Collection.

  35. ANW to Catharine Kerlin, [postmarked November 17, 1934], Private Collection.

  36. ANW to Catharine Kerlin, December 13, 1934, Private Collection.

  37. ANW, quoted by Tappan Wilder, “Amos Niven Wilder: The Memorial Service,” June 21, 1993.

  38. ANW to Catharine Kerlin, December 25, [1934?], Private Collection.

  39. ANW to Catharine Kerlin, January 17, 1935, Private Collection.

  40. ANW to Catharine Kerlin, February 11, [1935?], Private Collection.

  41. TNW to Leslie Glenn, [March 1935?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

  42. ANW to Catharine Kerlin, February 15, [1935?], Private Collection.

  43. “Amos Niven Wilder: The Memorial Service,” June 21, 1993, Private Collection.

  44. APW to Charlotte Wilder, January 29, 1935, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

  45. TNW to Grace Foresman, October 6, 1934, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  46. TNW to Sarah Frantz, October 13, 1934, SL, 287–88.

  47. TNW to Grace Foresman, December 21, 1934, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  48. ANW to Catharine Kerlin, January 9, [1935?], Private Collection. The name was Marian Truby.

  49. TNW to Amos Niven and Catharine Kerlin Wilder, September 22, 193
5, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  50. TNW, Heaven’s My Destination, 22–23.

  51. Ibid., 27.

  52. Ibid., 170.

  53. Ibid., 177.

  54. Ibid., 176.

  55. Ibid., 180.

  23: “STRANDS AND THREADS” (1930S)

  1. TNW, “James Joyce, 1882–1941,” American Characteristics, 168.

  2. TNW to Dwight Dana, December 9, 1934, Private Collection.

  3. TNW to Dwight Dana, May 16, 1934, Private Collection.

  4. TNW, Joan of Arc: Treatment for Motion Pictures, March 1934, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  5. Ibid. TNW took a proprietary interest in his rejected scenario for Joan of Arc, and approached Cass Canfield at Harper about publishing it. TNW argued that it would be the first movie scenario to be published in English, and publication would preserve the work from alteration. Nothing came of that proposal, however, and TNW’s treatment rested among his papers after his death, until it was published in the Yale Review in 2003.

  6. TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, August 29, [1934?]; YCAL. (TNW misdated this letter 1933.)

  7. Mollie Herrick, “Hollywood Sidelights,” September 14, 1934, quoted in A. Tappan Wilder, “Movie Treatment for Joan of Arc,” Yale Review 91, no. 4 (October 2003): 1–34.

  8. TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, October 7, 1934, YCAL.

  9. TNW to Family, [1933?], TNW Collection, YCAL. Hughes wrote a three-volume biography of George Washington.

  10. TNW to Charles Laughton, September 2, 1934, SL, 280–82.

  11. TNW to Alexander Woollcott, August 31, 1934, AWC, MS Am 1449 (1770), HLH. While we do not know why TNW chose this pseudonym in 1934, an actor who changed his name to James Craven played movie and television villains, beginning in 1940.

  12. TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder, September 8, 1934, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  13. TNW to Grace Foresman, October 6, 1934, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  14. TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, December 6, 1934, YCAL.

  15. TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder and Isabel Wilder, August 25, 1934, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  16. Tappan Wilder, introduction to “Joan of Arc: Treatment for Motion Pictures,” 4–5. This article provides background on TNW’s sojourns in Hollywood.

  17. Lee Keedick to TNW, March 1, 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL.

  18. TNW to Lee Keedick, January 14, 1935, TNW Collection, YCAL.