1. TNW to Eileen and Roland Le Grand, March 9, 1946, SL, 439–40.
2. Ibid.
3. TNW to June and Leonard Trolley, February 23, 1947, SL, 451–54. TNW had helped to make it possible for the Trolleys to marry during the war years in Caserta, where Leonard Trolley was one of TNW’s clerks. As it happened, the bride was an officer and the groom was an enlisted man, complicating their plans to marry.
4. TNW to Eileen and Roland Le Grand, March 9, 1946, SL, 439–40.
5. TNW to Glenway Wescott, April 7, 1948, SL, 459–61.
6. TNW’s work on Lope de Vega would earn him election to the Hispanic Society of America, an honor that meant a great deal to him.
7. TNW to Eileen and Roland Le Grand, March 9, 1946, SL, 439–40.
8. TNW to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, [March 30, 1946?], SL, 441–42. See also TNW to Jean-Paul Sartre, March 16, 1946, TNW Collection, YCAL.
9. TNW to Eileen and Roland Le Grand, March 9, 1946, SL, 439–40.
10. “About how Alcestis”: TNW to ANW [February 10, 1946?], TNW Collection, YCAL. “Grounded transparently in”: Walter Lowrie, trans., Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death by Anti-Climacus, in Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 351. Kierkegaard writes of “the Despair which is Conscious of being Despair, as also it is Conscious of being a Self wherein there is after all something Eternal, and then is either in despair at not willing to be itself, or in despair at willing to be itself,” ibid., 349. This passage evokes the Stage Manager’s words in act 3 of Our Town: “There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
11. TNW to ANW, [February 10, 1946], TNW Collection, YCAL.
12. TNW to Eileen and Roland Le Grand, March 9, 1946, SL, 439–40.
13. TNW to ANW, [February 10, 1946?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
14. Isabel Wilder to ANW, January 24, 1946, TNW Collection, YCAL.
15. Ibid.
16. Tappan Wilder to PEN, July 8, 2010.
17. TNW to Robert Van Gelder, “Interview with a Best-Selling Author: Thornton Wilder,” Cosmopolitan, April 1948, 18, 120–23; reprinted in Bryer, Conversations with Thornton Wilder, 41–45.
18. Thomas Coward, Coward-McCann, Inc., to Isabel Wilder, March 11, 1940, TNW Collection, YCAL. See also Isabel Wilder to Thew Wright, January 28, 1959, Private Collection. In the 1959 letter Isabel Wilder is in error about the dates, writing 1939 instead of 1940.
19. Thomas Coward, Coward-McCann, Inc., to Isabel Wilder, April 28, 1939, TNW Collection, YCAL.
20. Isabel Wilder to Family, April 14, 1944, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged papers. Throughout this book, background on Charlotte Wilder’s illness is drawn from her medical records and from numerous letters, as well as her correspondence to and from her family and friends contained in the uncataloged papers in the TNW Collection, YCAL, or in private collections.
21. Charlotte Wilder to Evelyn Scott, October 20, 1945, quoted by ANW, “Concerning Charlotte Wilder running from 1932 to 1961,” Wilder Records, August 1969, Private Collection.
22. Charlotte Wilder to Evelyn Scott, November 9, 1945, quoted by ANW, “Concerning Charlotte Wilder running from 1932 to 1961,” Wilder Records, August 1969. Private Collection.
23. Charlotte Wilder to Isabella Niven Wilder, April 15, 1946, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
24. Charlotte Wilder to ANW, February 23, 1946, quoted by ANW, “Concerning Charlotte Wilder running from 1932 to 1961,” Wilder Records, August 1969, Private Collection.
25. Charlotte Wilder to ANW, March 9, 1946, quoted by ANW, “Concerning Charlotte Wilder running from 1932 to 1961,” Wilder Records, August 1969. Private Collection.
26. TNW to ANW, May 31, [1946?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
27. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, January 7, 1947, SL, 449–50. The Dioscuri were Castor and Pollux or Polydeuces, the twin sons of Leda and Zeus. The Dioscuri were sometimes called the Heavenly Twins, part of the constellation of Gemini.
28. TNW to Amy Wertheimer, July 4, 1946, TNW Collection, YCAL.
29. TNW to William Rose Benét, July 17, 1946, YCAL.
30. Isabella Niven Wilder’s poem was quoted by Tappan Wilder at Isabel Wilder’s Memorial Service, March 25, 1995. Private Collection.
31. TNW to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, July 23, 1946, SL, 443–46.
32. TNW to Alice B. Toklas, October 8, 1946, SL, 446–48.
33. Ibid.
34. TNW, introduction, “Gertrude Stein’s Four in America,” in Four in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), vii; reprinted in Gallup, American Characteristics, 193–222.
In this book Stein created portraits of four national figures, speculating on what each would have done if he had chosen a different profession, picturing Ulysses S. Grant as a religious leader who became a saint; the Wright brothers as painters; Henry James as a general; and George Washington as a novelist.
35. Ibid., x, 200.
36. TNW, The Eighth Day, 10.
37. TNW to Isabel Wilder [January 30, 1947, postmarked Biloxi, Mississippi], TNW Collection, YCAL.
38. TNW to Isabel Wilder, [March?] 5, 1947, TNW Collection, YCAL. TNW dated this letter February 5, 1947, from Mérida, Yucatán. He must have meant March, judging by his travel schedule.
39. TNW to Isabel Wilder, [January 30, 1947], TNW Collection, YCAL.
40. TNW to Isabel Wilder, March 11, 1947, TNW Collection, YCAL.
41. TNW to Leonard Bacon, March 11, 1947, YCAL.
42. TNW to Isabel Wilder, March 24, 1947, TNW Collection, YCAL.
43. TNW to Leonard Bacon, July 22, 1947, YCAL.
44. TNW to June and Leonard Trolley, February 23, 1947, SL, 451–54.
45. TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder, November 5, 1922, TNW Collection, YCAL.
46. TNW, 1939–41 Journal, February 8, 1939, TNW Collection, YCAL.
47. TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, September 4, 1937, YCAL.
48. TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, March 25, 1942, YCAL.
49. TNW to Maxwell Anderson, November 13, 1956, SL, 543–44.
50. TNW to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, July 23, 1946, SL, 443–46.
51. TNW to Sibyl Colefax, January 7, [19]47, SL, 449–50.
52. TNW, in Whit Burnett, ed., 105 Greatest Living Authors Present the World’s Best Stories, Humor, Drama, Biography, History, Essays, Poetry (New York: Dial Press, 1950), 104–5. Wilder ranked nineteenth in the voting for the 105 greatest living authors. George Bernard Shaw was at the top of the list.
53. TNW to Maxwell Anderson, November 13, 1956, SL, 543–44.
54. Priscilla Booth Behnken, RN, and Elizabeth Good Merrill, RN, “Nursing Care Following Prefrontal Lobotomy,” American Journal of Nursing 49, no. 7 (July 1949): 418–19.
55. Janet Wilder Dakin, “Biographical Notes on Charlotte Wilder,” October 15, 1969, Private Collection.
56. Isabel Wilder, “About Charlotte Wilder,” TS, October 15, 1969, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged papers; and ANW, “Concerning Charlotte Wilder running from 1932 to 1961,” Wilder Records, August 1969, Private Collection.
57. Isabel Wilder, “About Charlotte Wilder,” TS, October 15, 1969, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged papers. Zelda Fitzgerald was a patient of Dr. Mildred Squires, then a resident at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. As part of her therapy, Dr. Squires encouraged Zelda to write Save Me a Waltz, which was published in 1932. Dr. Squires also encouraged Charlotte Wilder to continue writing.
58. Ibid.
59. TNW to Brooks Atkinson, December 20, 1947, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; TNW, The Ides of March, 25.
60. TNW, dedication to The Ides of March. All citations of The Ides of March throughout are to TNW, The Ides of March (New York: HarperPerennial, 2003), with a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and an afterword by Tappan Wilder.
61. For a detailed account of De Bosis’s flight over Rome see Dorothy Warren, ed., Th
e Letters of Ruth Draper: Self-Portrait of an Actress 1920–1956 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). Giovanni Bassanesi flew to Milan from Paris July 11, 1930, dropped his 150,000 pamphlets, and crashed his plane on the St. Gotthard Pass after he fled Milan. He survived the crash, however.De Bosis and/or Ruth Draper and TNW had several friends in common, including Edward Sheldon, Sibyl Colefax, and Sir John Gielgud. Ruth Draper and TNW corresponded occasionally over the years, and in one of her letters Draper enclosed a four-page typed copy of a letter De Bosis wrote to an unidentified English friend on December 28, 1930, about his plans. Ruth Draper to TNW, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.
62. TNW, The Ides of March, 212.
63. TNW, dedication to The Ides of March.
64. Ruth Draper to TNW, n.d. [March 18, 1948], TNW Collection, YCAL. In The Poet and the Dictator: Lauro de [sic] Bosis Resists Facism in Italy and America (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002), the biographer Jean McClure Mudge suggests that Wilder may have been infatuated or in love with De Bosis, and that he may have been jealous of Ruth Draper. My study of the Draper-Wilder correspondence, the Wilder–De Bosis correspondence, and other sources has not to date yielded documentation of the theory.
65. TNW to Maxwell Anderson, November 13, 1956, SL, 543–44.
66. TNW to Brooks Atkinson, December 20, 1947, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
67. TNW, The Ides of March, 32.
68. Ibid., 80
69. TNW to Brooks Atkinson, December 20, 1947, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
70. TNW to Rosemary Benét, [December 19?], 1947, YCAL.
71. Ibid.
72. TNW, The Ides of March, 89.
73. Ibid., epigraph.
74. TNW to Robert Van Gelder, “Interview with a Best-Selling Author: Thornton Wilder,” Cosmopolitan, April 1948, 1, 120–23; reprinted in Bryer, Conversations with Thornton Wilder, 41–45.
75. TNW, The Ides of March, 108.
76. TNW to Amy Wertheimer, February 25, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
77. Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield, John P. Marquand, and Christopher Morley, “Addenda From the Other Judges,” Book-of-the-Month Club News, February 1948, 5.
78. TNW to Amy Wertheimer, February 25, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
79. TNW to Alice B. Toklas, March 19, 1949, SL, 462–65.
80. TNW, The Ides of March, 153.
81. TNW to William Rose Benét, February 7, [1948?], YCAL.
82. TNW to Glenway Wescott, April 7, 1948, SL, 459–61.
83. Ibid.
84. TNW to Lillian Gish, April 1, 1947, SL, 454–56.
85. Century Association Program for April 26, 1947, published April 11, 1948, by the Century Association, TNW Collection, YCAL. There was a presentation of TNW’s work written just for the occasion and titled “Our Century.” The Century Association is an organization of writers, artists, and “amateurs” of letters and the fine arts.
86. The Unerring Instinct is published in McClatchy, Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater, 453–61. The play tells the story of a woman who plays a trick on her sister in order to demonstrate how susceptible unthinking people can be to falsehoods that are built on prejudice.
87. Glenway Wescott, Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 305–6.
88. Ibid., 256, 306.
89. TNW to Sam Steward, September 14, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL; TNW to Eliza —, August 7, [1948?], YCAL.
90. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 420, December 27, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
33: SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT WAY (1948–1950S)
1. TNW, Application for Military Permit to Enter Germany, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
2. TNW to Maxwell Anderson, July 5, 1948, SL, 461–62.
3. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 441, May 4, 1950, TNW Collection, YCAL. Approximately 60 percent of Wilder’s journal entries are published in Donald Gallup, ed., The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Some of these entries are published only in part. TNW’s journals prior to 1939 are unpublished at this writing.
4. Gallup, The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961, xxv–xxvi.
5. TNW, “Toward an American Language,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1952. This was TNW’s first Charles Eliot Norton Lecture, delivered at Harvard in 1950, and reprinted with some of Wilder’s later insertions, in Gallup, American Characteristics, 24. The Atlantic Monthly also published a second Norton Lecture, “The American Loneliness,” in August 1952; and a third, “Emily Dickinson,” in November 1952.
6. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 407, September 21, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
7. Ibid.
8. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 408, also September 21, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
9. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 409, September 22, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
10. Ibid.; TNW to Leonard Bacon, October 23, 1948, YCAL.
11. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 410, September 23, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
12. Ibid.
13. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 412, September 24, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
14. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 413, September 25, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
15. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 414, September 26, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
16. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 415, September 30, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
17. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 417, October 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL. In the original Journal, TNW labels the points of discussion a, b, c, and d. In the published version, the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 are used.
18. Ibid.
19. “Some Thoughts on Playwriting” was published first in Centeno, The Intent of the Artist, and then in Gallup, American Characteristics.
20. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 418, [1948?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
21. Ibid.
22. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 423, January 15, 1949, TNW Collection, YCAL.
23. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 421, December 27, 1948, TNW Collection, YCAL.
24. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 424, May 7, 1949, TNW Collection, YCAL.
25. Ibid.
26. Quoted in Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths, 282.
27. TNW to ANW, July 7, 1949, SL, 468–71.
28. TNW, “Goethe and World Literature,” Goethe Convocation, Aspen Colorado, July 1949. This lecture was first published in the proceedings of the convocation in 1949 as “World Literature and the Modern Mind,” Goethe and the Modern Age: The International Convocation at Aspen, Colorada, 1949. It was published as “Goethe and World Literature” in Arnold Bergstraesser, ed., Perspectives USA for Fall 1952 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, [1950?]). In that form it was reprinted in Gallup, American Characteristics, 137–48, from which quotations are taken.
29. TNW to ANW, July 7, 1949, SL, 468–71.
30. Ibid.
31. TNW, “Goethe and World Literature,” in Gallup, American Characteristics and Other Essays, 140.
32. Ibid., 142.
33. Ibid., 147.
34. Ibid., 147–48.
35. Ibid., 148.
36. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 426-A, July 23, 1949, TNW Collection, YCAL.
37. Ibid.
38. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 649, July 20, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL.
39. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 428, August 25, 1949, TNW Collection, YCAL.
40. TNW to Cary Grant, August 23, 1948, SL, 473–75.
41. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 429, September 28, [1949?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
42. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 436, March 26, [1950?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
43. TNW to Ava Bodley, Lady Anderson, March 19, 1950, SL, 486–88.
44. Ibid.
45. The professorship honored Harvard art professor, author, social critic, and man of letters Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), and the term “poetry” a
ttached to the professorship embraced all the written arts, as well as music and the visual arts. Wilder was immediately preceded by the composer Paul Hindemith, with whom he would later collaborate on an opera based on The Long Christmas Dinner.
46. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 436, March 26, [1950/], TNW Collection, YCAL.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 441, May 3, 1950, TNW Collection, YCAL.
50. TNW to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, July 19, 1950, SL, 489–91.
51. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 445, July 8, [1950?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
52. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 624, October 11, 1952, TNW Collection, YCAL.
53. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 542, April, [no day], 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
54. TNW to Howard Lowry, November 4, 1951, 493–96. TNW received an honorary degree from the College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, in 1950, and played the Stage Manager in a college production of Our Town there. Dr. Lowry was president of the college.
55. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entries 471, 478, and 487, November 4 and 15, and December 4, 1950, TNW Collection, YCAL.
56. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 543, May [no day], 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
57. TNW, “Toward an American Language,” in Gallup, American Characteristics, 9.
58. Ibid., 12.
59. Ibid., 14–15.
60. Ibid., 35.
61. Ibid., 63.
62. Ibid., 52.
63. Ibid., 52–53.
64. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 518, March 19, 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
65. Ibid.
66. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 520, March 22, 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
67. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 518, March 19, 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
68. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 528, April 1, 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
69. TNW to Howard Lowry, November 4, 1951, SL, 493–96.
70. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 542, April, [no day], 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
71. TNW to Howard Lowry, November 4, 1951, SL, 493–96.
72. TNW to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, June 15, [1951?], Private Collection.
73. TNW, “Thoughts for Our Times,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, July 7, 1951, 779–81. This address has been widely republished as a whole or in part.
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