Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.
—Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder: A Life, the first biography of the playwright and novelist since 1983, is also the first to be based on thousands of pages of letters, journals, manuscripts, and other documentary evidence of Wilder’s life, work, and times. For more than a decade, biographer Penelope Niven has worked with unprecedented access to Wilder’s papers, including his family’s private journals and records, searching for the secrets that illuminate Wilder’s public life and work, as well as the hidden inner self sometimes concealed and sometimes revealed in his art and in his papers.
Thornton Wilder was a multifaceted man: a teacher, novelist, playwright, lecturer, actor, musician, soldier, man of letters, outspoken citizen, and international public figure. He was also an enigmatic, intensely private man. He belonged to a close-knit, complicated family—two brilliant parents, four gifted siblings, and the specter of his twin brother lost at birth. His biography is also a compelling family saga, starring Thornton Wilder, with strong supporting roles played by his father, mother, brother, and sisters.
He was a gypsy, wandering the world, writing, he said, for and about everybody—a fact international audiences still embrace. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Eighth Day, and his other novels are still read in the United States and abroad. His plays, especially the iconic Our Town and the revolutionary Skin of Our Teeth, are still performed on stages around the globe.
Yet despite the international fame and visibility of Wilder the writer, far too little has been known or understood about Wilder the man—until now. Comprehensively researched and richly detailed, Thornton Wilder: A Life brings the private man center stage and sheds new light on his published and unpublished work.
About Penelope Niven
Penelope Niven is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of poet Carl Sandburg and photo-grapher Edward Steichen, as well as Swimming Lessons, a memoir, and Voices and Silences, coauthored with the actor James Earl Jones. She is the recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Thornton Wilder Visiting Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and other fellowships and awards. Niven lectures both in the United States and abroad, and she has served as a consultant for television films about Sandburg, Steichen, and Jones. She lives in North Carolina.
Editorial Review
There are times reading this new biography by Niven (Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water, 2004, etc.) when readers may wonder why a book about Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) is so inordinately concerned with the lives of his siblings. Biographical overkill, or is there some kind of a point? Both. For Niven, understanding Wilder’s family is simply vital to understanding Wilder, whose books and plays dig away at how people become who they are. His loving but repressive father, Amos, raised five children all over the world (while serving as President Taft’s consul to China) and micromanaged their lives every step of the way; they in turn bore the burden of his influence. At one extreme is Thornton; the son from whom Amos expected the least became a three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and playwright whose major dramas, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, are anchored by families as hopeful and anxiety-ridden as his own. At the other is sister Charlotte, an esteemed poet whose artistic life was cut short by tormented lesbian desires and schizophrenia. Wilder’s own sex life is a mystery; like Henry James, he left only scant evidence that he ever had one. He had other things on his mind, as Niven ably sums up: “How do you live? How do you bear the unbearable? How do you handle the various dimensions of love, of faith, of the human condition? How do universal elements forge every unique, individual life? And where does the family fit in the cosmic scheme of things?” For Wilder, the old questions were the only ones worth considering. – Kirkus Reviews
Wilder Created ‘Our Town’ With A Bit Of Everywhere
NPR Book Review – October 27, 2012 (Excerpt)
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is widely considered to be a classic American play: It puts plain-spoken lyricism on an empty stage with a story as simple as life and death.
Wilder was also an acclaimed novelist and essayist, but none of his dramas were as enduring asOur Town, which won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize. The play explores life — from childhood to marriage to death — in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, N.H. It’s been produced for film, radio and television, starring, at times, Paul Newman, Hal Holbrook, Helen Hunt and Frank Sinatra. In fact, the play is probably being performed by a community, church, high school or professional theater group somewhere this fall.
Now, acclaimed biographer Penelope Niven has written a book, Thornton Wilder: A Life, that tells the story of how the signature play came to be written. She joins NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss Wilder’s life and the universal appeal of Our Town. [Read the full article...]
A Life Captured With Luster Left Intact - ‘Thornton Wilder: A Life,’ by Penelope Niven
The New York Times Book Review – October 31, 2012 (Excerpt)
“Art is confession; art is the secret told,” Thornton Wilder wrote shortly after fame and the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes had come to him in his early 30s. “But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.” That suggestive formulation is as evocative today as it was when Wilder penned it in 1928. But now we are more likely to associate specific literary genres with the heart’s hidden truths: the ever-billowing genre of memoir is confession, we might say, and biography is the secret told.
It’s probably unnecessary to add that the revelations such books traffic in are likely to be of the sensational variety, tales of turbulent relationships and dogged addictions.
Among the refreshing aspects of Penelope Niven’s new biography, “Thornton Wilder: A Life,” is its startling sexlessness, the paucity of the kind of dish that sometimes has seemed to drive the market in literary biography in recent decades. Ms. Niven, the author of books about Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen, has dug deeply into the copiously documented life of her subject, drawing on access to substantial troves of previously undisclosed family papers. [Read the full article...]
Book review: ‘Thornton Wilder: A Life’ by Penelope Niven
The Washington Post Book Review – November 30, 2012 (Excerpt)
In 1962, at the age of 65, Thornton Wilder made a dramatic getaway, driving alone from the East Coast to Douglas, Ariz. He didn’t so much choose Douglas as let it choose him — his car died there — but he liked it enough to stick around for 20 months.
What sent one of the greatest living American authors — the first to win Pulitzer Prizes in fiction (“The Bridge of San Luis Rey”) and drama (“Our Town”) — to a nowhere town where he didn’t know a soul? A case of excessive sociability.
Penelope Niven’s rich life of Wilder, which draws upon archives unavailable to previous biographers, situates him firmly in his family: old New England Puritan stock, with all the sexual repression that suggests; not much money; a domineering father, who tried to manipulate his children like a puppeteer; an artistic mother. There were five children in all, each with artistic leanings of one kind or another. Even the oldest, Amos, who was destined to be a clergyman, published a volume in the Yale Younger Poets series. [Read the full article...]
Stage Manager - ‘Thornton Wilder: A Life,’ by Penelope Niven
The New York Times Book Review – December 28, 2012 (Excerpt)
Writing in his memoirs, Tennessee Williams remembers paying a visit to Thornton Wilder after the New Haven opening of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947). Wilder — then at the height of his eminence, having won Pulitzers for both “Our Town” (1938) and “The Skin of Our Teeth” (1942) — dismissed Williams’s latest effort with the air of one “delivering a papal bull,” as Williams put it. A “lady” like Stella, Wilder declared, would never marry a “vulgarian” like Stanley Kowalski. “This character,” Williams reflected of his colleague at the time, “has never had a good lay.” With the perspicacity that would lead him to become, arguably, our greatest postwar playwright, Williams had pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Granted, Wilder came by his inhibitions honestly. His father, Amos, had been a well-meaning, dismal prig: as editor and owner of The Wisconsin State Journal, he liked to point out that his was the first daily newspaper to refuse liquor advertisements, and later, as a somewhat inept consul general to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, he made sure that nothing stronger than grape juice and water was served at the consulate’s Fourth of July party, hitherto a rather jolly affair. Thornton and his younger sister Charlotte were enjoined to sign lifelong temperance pledges, and along with their siblings they were regaled on the Sabbath with windy readings from the Bible and “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” [Read the full article...]
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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings
