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, Heavens 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 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 descriprions 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 Hin-demith, 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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Also by Thornton Wilder
NOVELS
The Cabala
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
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 and Other Plays
The Long Christmas Dinner & Other Plays in One Act
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Vol. 1
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Vol. 2
PLAYS
Our Town
The Merchant of Yonkers
The Skin of Our Teeth
The Matchmaker
The Alcestaid
The Beaux’ Stratagem (co-adapted by Ken Ludwig)
A Doll’s House
LETTERS AND ESSAYS
American Characteristics
The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939—1961
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder
A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen
Copyright
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1948 by Harper & Brothers, Publishers. It is reprinted here by arrangement with the Wilder Family LLC.
THE IDES OF MARCH. Copyright © 1948 by the Wilder Family LLC. Introduction © 2020 by Jeremy McCarter. Foreword © 2003 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Afterword © 2020 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 hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL MODERN CLASSICS PAPERBACK PUBLISHED 2020
FIRST PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2003.
FIRST PERENNIAL LIBRARY EDITION PUBLISHED 1987.
Cover design by Catherine Casalino
Cover photograph © Balazs Kovacs/Arcangel Images
Digital Edition AUGUST 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-306012-8
Version 07082020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-299019-8
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*Still recovering from the WWI disruption, the Academy filled empty beds with suitable paid-up students.
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