The Skin of Our Teeth

by Thornton Wilder

  Letters and Journals

  Quotations from Thornton Wilder’s letters and his journal are taken from one of two principal sources: the unpublished letters, manuscripts, and related files in the Wilder Family Archives in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Wilder family’s own holdings, including many of Thornton Wilder’s legal and agency papers. Minor spelling errors have been silently corrected. All rights are reserved for this material.

  Publications

  Excerpts from published sources are identified in the order of their appearance in the text, with permissions noted as required: Richard Maney’s summary of The Skin of Our Teeth is printed in his memoir Fanfare: The Confessions of a Press Agent (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 330. Copyright © 1957 by Richard Maney. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. The December 2, 1941, excerpt from Wilder’s journal appears in Donald Gallup, Ed., The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 37–38. Copyright © 1985 by Union Trust Company. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. The excerpt from Wilder’s “After a Visit to England” is published in The Yale Review XXXI: 2 (December 1941): 217–24. Reprinted courtesy of The Yale Review. Wilder’s December 17, 1942, letter was published as “A Footnote to The Skin of Our Teeth,” The Yale Review 87: 4 (October 1999): 68–70. Both Yale Review pieces are printed with the permission of Tappan Wilder.

  On February 2, 1954, Wilder spoke to the James Joyce Society on “Joyce and the Modern Novel.” He later adapted his lecture for publication by the James Joyce Society in 1957. It was published in Wilder’s American Characteristics & Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1957; Authors Guild Backinprint Edition, 2000), pp. 172–80. Reprinted by permission of Tappan Wilder. Wilder’s “Some Thoughts on Playwrighting” first appeared in Augusto Centeno, Ed., The Intent of the Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941) and is published in American Characteristics & Other Essays, pp. 115–26. Reprinted by permission of Tappan Wilder.

  Photographs

  The original 1942 cast Playbill is reproduced with the permission of Playbill®. The five photographs of the original production appeared in Life magazine on November 30, 1942, pp. 93–100. They were taken by George Karger and reproduced with permission of George Karger/Pix Inc./Timepix. The author’s photo, courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature and by permission of Tappan Wilder, shows Thornton Wilder playing the part of Mr. Antrobus in an unidentified summer stock production in 1947.

  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 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 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 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 Worl
d 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

  The Bridge of San Luis Rey

  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 Matchmaker

  The Alcestiad

  Essays

  American Characteristics & Other Essays

  The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961

  Copyright

  Caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that The Skin of Our Teeth, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. All inquiries concerning all rights (other than amateur) should be addressed to the author’s agent, Robert A. Freedman Dramatic Agency, Inc., 1501 Broadway, Suite 2310, New York, NY 10036, without whose permission in writing no performance of the play must be made. All inquiries concerning the amateur acting rights should be addressed to Samuel French, Inc., 45 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10010. No amateur performance of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of Samuel French, Inc., and paying the requisite royalty fee.

  THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH. Copyright © 1942 by Thornton Niven Wilder. Copyright renewed © 1970, the Wilder Family LLC. Foreword copyright © 2003 by Paula Vogel. 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.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilder, Thornton.

  The skin of our teeth / Thornton Wilder.

  p. cm.—(Perennial classics)

  ISBN 0-06-008893-1

  Epub Edition © FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780062232717

  1. World history—Drama. I. Title. II. Perennial classic.

  PS3545.I345S5 2003

  813’.52—dc21

  2002044993

  03 04 05 06 07 WB/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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