I cannot believe that the reputation of Thornton Wilder, either as a novelist or as a playwright, has not suffered a greater diminution than Gilbert Harrison has implied by writing Wilder’s biography.[1] We should be grateful that he has done so. There is no necessary connection between the rank of a writer’s professional achievement and the interest attaching to his day-by-day existence. Harrison has given Wilder’s life a unique interest simply by organizing its sequences with copious documentation, notably from Wilder’s personal correspondence. As a result, Harrison has uncovered, very far from his intention, I’m sure, a dumbfoundingly consistent history of self-concealment.

Those who think of Wilder as principally the author of that bare-stage, bare-language attempt to find big meanings in limited circumstance, Our Town (1938), will need the reminder that Wilder had made an extraordinarily successful debut as a stylist in prose fiction twelve years earlier, with a curious pastiche, The Cabala, (the final version of what had first been entitled Memoirs of a Roman Student). Past and present overlap in this self-consciously erudite fable of one year in the Eternal City centered on a handful of somewhat decadent characters who Wilder claimed were inspired less by his firsthand observations in Italy than by his reading of Proust, La Bruyère, Saint-Simon, Thomas Mann, and Lytton Strachey. (It became Wilder’s custom to call attention to the scope of his researches by the pretense of modestly exposing his indebtedness.) Considering that the puritan hero, returning to the