Based on more than a decade’s research and travel, Thornton Wilder: A Life is written by Penelope Niven, distant kin of Thornton’s mother, Isabella Niven Wilder. Wilder (1897–1975) was, by his own admission, a gypsy, peripatetic to the last, dying at seventy-eight in the family home at Hamden, Connecticut, not far from New Haven.

He journeyed and sojourned all over the U.S., Europe, and South America, studied as a schoolboy in China, and served as an officer in North Africa with Air Corps Intelligence during World War II. Though a staunch American, he was equally a citizen of the world, writing, as he stressed, about and for Everyman. He won awards and fame in more or less equal measure for his novels and plays, although it is mostly through the latter that he survives.

Thornton’s very New England father, Amos Parker Wilder, was a newspaper owner and editor turned American consul general in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Both Thornton and his eldest sister, Charlotte, attended an English school in provincial China, where they may have incurred outsider feelings. Their mother was the cultivated Isabella, a fine pianist, an amateur poet, and a translator of Verhaeren and Carducci, no less. But Amos shockingly told her that there was no tenderness left in him after the girl he really loved turned him down.

Strictly religious and a fanatical teetotaler, Amos was a devoted but domineeringly meddlesome father to another Amos, Thornton, Charlotte, Isabel, and Janet, and