During World War II, he served as an air intelligence officer and achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. In this same period, he worked for several motion picture studios as a screenwriter. In 1930, however, Wilder returned to the classroom, teaching drama and poetry at the University of Chicago, a position he retained until 1936. Seven years later, Wilder was able to live on the income of his writing. He returned to America to teach French and to counsel at a prep school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey he completed a master's degree in English from Princeton in 1926. Upon completing high school in Berkeley, California, in 1915, he attended Oberlin College for two years, served in the coast artillery in 1918, and graduated from Yale in 1920 with a degree in classical literature.įrom 1920 to 1921, Wilder spent a year studying archeology at the American Academy in Rome, where he participated in the excavation of an Etruscan roadway. Thornton Wilder, therefore, received his early education in Chinese missionary schools in Hong Kong, Chefoo, and Shanghai. Through his friend President Taft, he was named America's Consulate-General to Hong Kong in 1906. Early in his son's life, Amos Wilder studied economics and edited the Wisconsin State Journal. His parents - Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Thornton Wilder - believed strongly in culture and stressed religion, education, and intellectual pursuits to their five children. Both of Wilder's grandfathers were clergymen, and he himself considered going into the ministry. He tends toward the mainstream of the American tradition. Making no apologies for his nostalgic journey into the past, he asserts his optimism in an age of pessimism.Īlthough Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, April 17, 1897, his tastes are not regional. In an age obsessed with the unusual and the bizarre, the neurotic and the psychotic, Wilder turns his attention to the attributes and universality of the ordinary citizen. Deceptively simple in structure and tone, the play represents many of the author's humanistic views. Our Town pays tribute to traditional American hometown values. Our Town remains a perennial favorite among directors, particularly in small-town productions. First produced at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 22, 1938, the play wavered in Boston, was moved to New York, and, to the surprise of both the playwright and his collaborators, won a Pulitzer Prize as the best play of the season. Translated and produced throughout the world, it has been called a poetic chronicle of life and death.

Thornton Niven Wilder's Our Town is a major work in the canon of American theater.

Thornton wilder play