Photographs
Both the photograph of Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder and the photograph appearing with the author’s biography are reproduced with the permission of Tappan Wilder.
About the Author
Yale Collection of American Literature
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 from 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 he 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 Wooll-cott, 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 Springs, 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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Works by Thornton Wilder
NOVELS
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY
ISBN 0-06-008887-7 (paperback)
Foreword by Russell Banks
The Bridge of San Luis Rey opens in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy—a footbridge in Peru breaks and five people fall to their deaths. For Brother Juniper, a humble monk who witnesses the catastrophe, the question is inescapable: why those five? Through the device of Brother Juniper’s drive to understand whether their deaths were caused by fete or divine intervention, Wilder’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel explores what is important and what is lasting about life and living.
“One of the greatest reading novels in this century’s American writing.”
—Edmund Fuller
THEOPHILUS NORTH
ISBN 0-06-008892-3 (paperback)
Foreword by Christopher Bu
ckley
An exhausted 29-year-old teacher arrives in Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1926. To support himself, he takes jobs in the great homes of families living along Ocean Drive—playing the roles of tutor, spy, confidante, lover, friend, and enemy in the colorful, tension-filled upstairs-and-downstairs world of Newport in the golden 1920s. Along the way, the novel raises gentle but trenchant questions about what’s important, the nature and role of youth, and what wealth does to those who have it and those who do not.
“A testimony to the human race.” —New York Times Book Review
HEAVEN’S MY DESTINATION
ISBN 0-06-008889-3 (paperback)
Foreword by J. D. McClatchy
First published in 1934, Heavens My Destination contains one of Wilder’s most memorable characters: the heroic traveling textbook salesman George Marvin Brush. George’s territory is the Midwest and, as a fervent religious convert, he is determined to lead a good Christian life. But his travels take him through smoking cats, bawdy houses, and trailer camps of Depression-era America with often hilarious results.
“A good sardonic etching of this most godless of American ages.” —Commonweal
THE CABALA AND THE WOMAN OF ANDROS
ISBN 0-06-051857-X (paperback)
Foreword by Penelope Niven
Two of Wilder’s early novels are collected here: The Cabala (1926), a fantasy about American expatriates, and The Woman of Andros (1930), a novel in which Wilder creates a character that serves as his archetype of the virtue of hope.
THE IDES OF MARCH
ISBN 0-06-008890-7 (paperback)
Foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
First published in 1948, The Ides of March is a brilliant epistolary novel of Julius Caesar’s Rome. Through imaginary letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of its magnetic personalities.
“What distinguishes [The Ides of March] is a rich, shrewd, and glowing characterization of Caesar’s restless mind.” —New York Times
THE EIGHTH DAY
ISBN 0-06-008891-5 (paperback)
Foreword by John Updike
First published in 1967, near the end of Wilder’s life, this novel moves back and forth through the 20th-century, telling the story of a talented inventor accused of murder.
PLAYS
THREE PLAYS
Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker
ISBN 0-06-051264-4 (paperback)
Foreword by John Guare
This omnibus volume brings together the definitive texts of three outstanding plays.
OUR TOWN: A PLAY
ISBN 0-06-051263-6 (paperback)
Foreword by Donald Margulies
First produced and published in 1938, this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the small village of Grover’s Corners has become an American classic and is Thornton Wilder’s most renowned and most frequently performed play.
“Mr. Wilder has transmuted the simple events of human life into universal reverie. . . . One of the finest achievements of the current stage.” —Brooks Atkinson
THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH: A PLAY
ISBN 0-06-008893-1 (paperback)
Foreword by Paula Vogel
Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (1943) madcap comedy of how the Antrobus family and its maid prevail over successive catastrophes.
“It is not easy to think of any other American play with so good a chance of being acted a hundred years from now.” —Alexander Woollcott, Atlantic Monthly, 1944
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Also by Thornton Wilder
NOVELS
The Cabala and The Woman of Andros
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Heaven’s My Destination
The Ides of March
The Eighth Day
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 published in 1973 by Harper & Row, Publishers. It is reprinted here by arrangement with the Wilder Family LLC.
THEOPHILUS NORTH. Copyright © 1973 by Thornton Wilder. Copyright renewed © 2000 by the Wilder Family LLC. Foreword copyright © 2003 by Christopher Buckley. 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 e-book 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 e-books.
First Perennial edition published 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilder, Thornton.
Theophilus North / Thornton Wilder.—1st Perennial ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-008892-3
EPub Edition February 2014 ISBN 9780062232694
1. Newport (R.I.)—Fiction. 2. Rich people—Fiction. 3. Young men—Fiction. 4. Teachers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3545.I345T5 2003
813’.52—dc2l
2002192980
13 14 WB/RRD 10 9 8 7
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