Copyright © by the Union Trust Company, New Haven, CT. Excerpted from The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939-61, selected and edited by Donald Gallup, to be published this month by Yale University Press.

Introduction

The American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder was born in Wisconsin in 1897 and died in his Connecticut home in 1975. Reared in China and the United States, he graduated from Yale University in 1920. In the Twenties he was a teacher of French at the Lawrenceville School, and in the Thirties a professor of English at the University of Chicago. His first novel, The Cabala, was published in 1926. His second, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, published the following year, won Wilder the first of three Pulitzer Prizes and made him a figure of international renown. His other novels include The Woman of Andros (1930), Heaven’s My Destination (1935), The Ides of March (1948), The Eighth Day (1967), and Theophilus North (1973).

Beginning in the Thirties, Wilder also achieved a considerable success as a playwright. Two of his plays—Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)—won Pulitzer Prizes and have remained familiar classics. A third, The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), was successfully revised in 1954 as The Matchmaker. (It was made into the musical comedy, Hello, Dolly!, in 1963.) In 1950-51, Wilder served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, delivering a series of lectures on the classic