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>> I'm Elizabeth Isenberg.
I am the executive director here
at the Janesville Performing
Arts Center.
We want to welcome you all this
evening for our lecture here
that's part of The Big Read
program.
Thanks to Young Auditorium and a
lot other folks I will list in a
second, this lecture was brought
to you today free of charge, and
it's great that we are able to
host this event.
This free Academy Evening is
co-presented by the Wisconsin
Academy of Sciences, Arts, and
Letters with the Janesville
Performing Arts Center, UW
Whitewater, and the
community-wide Big Read program.
The Big Read is a program by the
National Endowment for the Arts,
in partnership with Arts
Midwest.
Sponsorship support is also
provided by American Family
Insurance and Fort Healthcare.
We're here to welcome Tappan
Wilder as well as Penelope
Niven.
And I'm sure they will tell you
all about themselves as well,
but I'll give you each a brief
bio.
Tappan Wilder is Thornton
Wilder's nephew and literary
executor and the manager of his
literary and dramatic
properties.
He is also involved with the
literary legacies of Thornton's
three sisters and older brother.
Penelope is the critically
acclaimed author of Carl
Sandburg: A Biography and most
recently Thornton Wilder: A
Life.
She has been awarded two
honorary doctorates, three
fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities,
and the Thornton Wilder visiting
fellowship at the Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library at
Yale University, among other
honors.
If you could all join me in
welcoming both Tappan and
Penelope.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you very much.
I'm delighted to be in
Janesville.
I'm almost 99% sure that--
I should say I am the son of
Thornton Wilder's older brother.
My dad was born in 1895, and I
am 216 years old.
[LAUGHTER]
He married late, and I was born
in 1940.
So Thornton Wilder is indeed my
uncle, and I had the great
pleasure of knowing him pretty
well.
My father lived to be 97, and so
it all worked out just fine.
But my father fought in the
first World War, and he sent
these letters home to his father
who'd been, at one time, the
owner and the editor of the
Wisconsin State Journal.
And they got circulated around,
and quite a few of them were
published in the Janesville
Gazette.
So, back in the archives there,
you can blow it off, my father
is present in Janesville.
This is first visit, but I'm
very, very glad to be here.
My role today-- How do I get
this up a little bit?
There.
My role today is to kind of open
the door, and to Penelope Niven,
the extraordinary biographer
who's written the book of the
ages about my uncle and lots
more too.
Here's the picture of where we
are today.
Every 10 or 12 days, there's a
production of The Skin of Our
Teeth and a production of The
Matchmaker.
Every five days, one of my
uncle's one-act plays is
performed somewhere.
Every day at least, and often
more often, there's a production
of Our Town.
And there's Hello, Dolly!
which is an adaptation of one
of his plays, is done almost 365
days a year too.
Thornton Wilder, and his books
are read everywhere, he's all
over the place, but very little
is really known about him.
Now, that's changed a lot in
just the last five or six years.
Those of you who are into
letters may know that The Book
of Letters, published just two
or three years ago, based on
drawing on 8,000 of Thornton
Wilder's letters.
A selected letters book.
I have a copy to show it to you.
And there's also three volumes
now in the Library of America
Series of Thornton Wilder's
drama and fiction with a lot of
unpublished material at the end
of each volume.
It's a great honor to be in the
Library of America.
When you're in there, you are
published forever.
His essays have been
republished.
His one-act plays have been
republished.
There's a volume coming out, God
help us, in a few months from
Northwestern.
Even the scholars are getting
interested in Wilder, and we
will have essays from
Northwestern University Press.
There is a Wilder Society.
And for 25 bucks, you can join
it and it's an international
group and they hold meetings and
they are pushing and
rediscovering a great deal about
Wilder and his family too.
So, it's a very lively time, but
missing from all this has been a
decent biography by any measure.
There have been books.
They don't count.
I said a few earlier today that
I am the son of an ordained
minister and I have described,
but now that I'm being taped,
I'm going to be very careful,
the quality of the books that
existed.
I use language I should not use.
A preacher's kid's license to
describe some of those works.
We needed a real biography.
When my sister and I inherited
the management of our uncle's
affairs, we sat down and, after
a review of the situation,
decided that we wanted to find a
biographer who loved to do,
Dick, you'll appreciate this,
hardcore, what I call
dirty-fingered archival
research.
Who would not be appalled by
paper.
And in fact would welcome the
opportunity to be buried in it,
if not suffocated by it, because
this is a family which is paper
heavy.
And we wanted a woman because
the story of Thornton Wilder's
life is, in part, the story of
his family.
And I'm going to introduce you
to the cast of characters in a
moment, very briefly.
I'm going to run through a lot
of slides faster than you've
seen slides in a long time.
And we thought, frankly, that a
woman might be more sensitive to
these issues.
Now that is today a sexist
statement, but I said it and
I'll stand by it.
And we found our way to Penelope
Niven.
She is a woman, and she's a
Southern.
That, of course, was initially a
problem for me as a Northern
because we all fear our
prejudices about those things.
I once had a difficult time in
the south as a young man in the
'60s, but that's another story.
But we found her, we fell in
love with her, we opened the
door to her, and we buried her
in paper.
[LAUGHTER]
That was some years ago.
She's survived.
Here we are to celebrate this
extraordinary book.
Now, what did we give her?
We gave her the life and times
and the work of a man who, among
other things, had written the
two works that The Big Read is
celebrating here.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
Here is what the original copy
looked like.
I'm going to now move very
quickly.
This book was attractive in the
cover, but anybody who looked at
it inside, and indeed this is in
print, found an extremely
unattractive book.
The publishers were very nervous
about it.
They wanted to charge $2.50, and
Thornton Wilder handed in a
manuscript that was about 35,000
words I think, something like
that.
And he couldn't seem to get any
more out of it.
And so, they did what you do in
a situation like this: thick
paper, huge, unattractive pages.
Look at the white space at the
bottom of a sample page of The
Bridge of San Luis Rey.
It was voted one of the most
unattractive books of the year.
[LAUGHTER]
But what happened?
They published 4,000 copies in
the beginning.
This is his second novel.
They had some good luck with the
first one, but they weren't
expecting anything.
It was a very literary novel.
This is what happened.
In late December--
November it was published.
In December alone, seven
printings of at least 10,000
copies each.
They couldn't keep up with it.
In England it was hard news,
because it was published there
too, that printers were working
overtime to get ready for the
Christmas trade.
And it just starts this way, and
it's, in a way, never stopped.
The Bridge has never been out of
print.
Here is a sample royalty
statement that he received that
I found in my records.
I've sent 75 boxes of stuff to
Yale the other day for the
Wilder archives.
I forgot to send them this.
So I'll have to send it along.
But this is the sort of thing
that a writer would dream of.
Here's the royalty report that
shows already 233-odd-thousand
copies sold.
This is a 1928 royalty report.
He made, in modern terms, over a
million dollars.
It was like a light beam just
turned on in the room.
It was that fast.
It was that extraordinary.
And of course it changed
everything in his life.
Among other things, he was able
to build a home for his mother.
He was proud of it.
They never had a home, the
Wilder family, in Hamden,
Connecticut on the outside of
New Haven, just on the edge of
New Haven.
This is as it looks really
today.
Though, it looks very much the
way it looked when they built it
in 1930.
He also invested quite a lot of
money in the stock market a
couple months before the fall of
1929.
But it was all in good stocks,
ladies and gentlemen.
It came back.
A huge success like that could
kill you.
Could kill you as an artist.
It didn't kill Thornton Wilder.
He wrote his first play in
1913; he wrote his last novel,
Theophilus North, in 1973.
He had a run of 60 years, and it
was a successful run all over
the place in everything he
tried.
It wasn't always a success.
The Bridge movie, you can see
this in 1944, I'm not even going
to talk about it, it's on the
late show, it's really terrible.
One thing about The Bridge as
it's read, it's an extraordinary
read.
It's about intention.
It's about art.
It's about love.
Fate.
Faith.
Hope.
It's a full course meal, but it
doesn't translate very well to
film or even to being
dramatized.
This is the 44th film which you
do see.
Along came, I forget the year
now off my notes, but just a few
years ago, here Robert De Niro,
Kathy Bates, F Murray Abraham.
What a cast.
I'm sorry.
I just don't have the date.
It was just a few years ago.
And the king and queen were, it
was filmed in Spain, in
Marbella, Spain, the king and
queen at a big party, and I was
going to be invited.
I was all excited.
I was going to buy a suit and
look great.
Total disaster.
They opened it in Madrid around
the corner in the theater.
I sent a dear friend of my who I
met in Madison when I was a
graduate student here, he was a
very distinguished student of
Spanish literature, to see it.
He sent me an email that said it
stinks.
[LAUGHTER]
And it was released in this
country slightly.
You can get it.
It's just terrible.
Why is it terrible?
Well, it's a book which, in a
sense, it's very ethereal in
feeling.
It's hard to make a story out of
it on film.
It falls apart.
It just falls apart.
There was a silent movie which
is terribly interesting.
But they're fixing it up, and
they may release it.
It had a little sound at the
end, and it focused on the love
affair in the book.
And our wonderful Brother
Juniper does not die in this
film, he preaches the sermon.
So they changed it around.
In some ways it may be the most
successful film of all, and I
hope MGM will, they talk about
releasing it again.
But isn't that extraordinary?
Lili Damita, oh, boy, they
turned the actress in the novel
into a dancer, and the dance in
that movie, I've seen it in
Eastman House, they have a
museum at Eastman House where
they have what's left of the
tape, and what a dance.
I know where the censorship
board came from in the 1930s.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's published all over
the place.
It works as a book, and it's the
kind of novel today which
readers, I hope you among them,
perhaps you all have read it,
will discover it.
It's a book you discover.
It's not assigned in class the
way it used to be.
It used to be a ubiquitous part
of the reading list of every
summer.
Every summer reading list.
Not now.
To Kill a Mockingbird kind of
knocked it out of its place.
But it's published and
increasingly being published
around the world.
And then we handed our poor
Penny Our Town.
Does lightning strike twice?
It certainly did for Thornton
Wilder.
This is my parents wedding in
1935 where my uncle learned for
the first time the old tradition
of the bride not seeing the
groom until they met at the
alter.
And he was thinking about a play
along these lines, and this
moment was a moment that
crystallized many of his ideas.
There's my father, Amos Wilder,
Thornton, and my mother, who
lived to be 99.
That dress and that moment is so
famous, it's now on display in
the Moorestown Historical
Society in New Jersey.
Moorestown, M-O-O-R-E-S.
Not Morristown, Moorestown.
And a few days after this
wedding, Thornton Wilder penned
the line, a few lines of dialog
called M marries N.
That's in the play.
That's the oldest line in the
play.
There's a wonderful production
this weekend.
I hope you'll all see it and
you'll think of New Jersey when
you come to that part of the
play.
And this is, quickly, one of the
programs.
Very quickly Our Town, of
course, became identified, I'm
going to have to reach for some,
identified with a celebration of
small town life in America.
This is the little flier for the
first production.
It was in Princeton, New Jersey.
The first full length play by
the distinguished author of
course is The Bridge of San Luis
Rey, The Woman of Andros, his
novels, and a record of a tiny
New Hampshire village as created
in the lives of its humble
inhabitants.
I'm not going to be able to give
you the big lecture that you
don't want to hear on Our Town,
but I have to say that for a
long time and for many years, it
became associated of course with
high schools, as it still is,
and it became associated with
the celebration of something
terribly American, something
terribly authentic about small
town life and, beyond that,
something larger of course.
But this is, I'm going to skip
this.
This is the original program for
the Broadway production.
There's a very good reason for
that because, of course, it was
done in all these places.
After the Broadway production
closes, after 300-odd
performances, nothing
particularly special, a 10-week
run out of town, it's released
for the first time to the
amateur market by Samuel French
in the fall of 1939.
And it is performed nearly 700
times in the first 20 months of
its release.
All over the country.
This I found in his legal files
doing my own research some years
ago, a 10-page document that
showed all the towns in which it
was done in that period.
There were, you'd be pleased to
know, 14 in Wisconsin.
Not Janesville, I'm sorry to
say.
The closest was Madison on July
15th, 1940.
And this shows Madison down
here.
And it's always been that way.
A story that was real to all of
us.
How many of you were in it?
How many of you have seen your
grandchildren in it?
[LAUGHTER]
Well, the critics, of course,
that Our Town, and it's partly
the history and it partly is
Our Town, hated it.
"Wilder, this is 1958, has
produced a pretty Andrew
Wyeth-like landscape almost
doomed by its superficial
attractiveness.
There is no malice in Grover's
Corners, no death."
I can't believe it.
It's nothing but death.
"Anglo-Saxon to its core,
loveable, supremely marketable,
and supremely phony."
That's the way our hard-boiled
critics of Our Town for a long
time.
That's not the play, however,
which we have given to Penelope
Niven.
I'm sorry Thornton Wilder didn't
live to see what happened
subsequently.
Because he realized it was a
problem with the play.
He always used to say,
"Remember, this play is about
everywhere."
He wrote in 1939 after it had
opened, "I get letters from
people who've been seeing it in
Italy and lots of places, and
they know it's about
everywhere."
It's not primarily about
American small town life.
In 1967, and this is my last
quote, he wrote a letter in
which he said after he heard
about a very interesting
production in San Francisco,
"People were surprised the play
had such meat in it.
They had seen it often, usually
with relatives in the cast, and
remembered it as petty,
pathetic, and easily
forgettable."
But in the last 10 or 15 years,
Our Town has been rediscovered.
I call it Our Town in recovery.
The high school production,
here's one from 1950, is still
very much a part of the history,
an exciting part of the history,
for Our Town, and it's where
students learn so much about
drama.
But perhaps those days are over,
and perhaps the days are over
where the play as yesterday,
celebrated in 1997 when the
Wilder stamp was produced, was
all Our Town.
That's what the Our Town stamp
is all about.
I hope you licked it.
[LAUGHTER]
It was done in New Haven,
Connecticut, and Hamden, where,
as I say, he lived.
And just for fun I'll show you,
the Postal Service asked Carol
Channing to come lick the first
stamp.
[LAUGHTER]
And there she is and yours
truly.
That was quite an event.
Today's Our Town in high schools
and colleges and done by
professionals, I find that I've
seen an awful lot of
productions, an awful lot.
They're harder edged.
This is the Cromer production
which ran in New York City for
over 600 performances.
And a version of it done in
California and recently in
Boston.
Intimate and small in this case.
You can see the audience.
This is audience there.
And in this scene they've
actually got him out of blue
jeans.
Usually the actors are just
wearing blue jeans.
A very different performance.
This is the performance that
Edward Albee saw several times.
Edward Albee, who said for so
long, "How can you take a tough
existential play like Our Town
and turn it into the Christmas
card?"
This is from the same
performance.
The printed edition that I had
the pleasure of editing in the
last 10 years has sold over half
a million copies.
Extraordinary for a play.
We also handed the story of a
man who knew language as well as
was a translator adapter.
Here he is translating for
Switzer.
He worked in three or four
languages.
We handed a traveler over two
hundred days a year, traveling,
traveling, traveling.
I've shown a picture to suggest
the travel of the Hotel Belvoir
in Switzerland.
In fact, this is where much of
Our Town came together in 1937.
He really all but finished the
play at this hotel near Zurich,
five miles from Zurich on the
banks of the lake.
We handed him, I mentioned
translations and adaptations, a
man loves to discover.
Here is Ruth Gordon celebrating
a record-breaking performance of
A Doll's House in 1938, the same
year Our Town was opened.
Both plays were running
together.
Both were hits.
The Doll's House of that period,
after 133 performances, held the
Broadway record for nearly 50
years.
We found this play, and we're
going to release it again soon.
We've handed Penny a man who
also wrote successful films.
Here he is with Hitchcock on
Shadow of a Doubt, one of the
great movies.
We've handed her the story of a
musician.
Thornton Wilder did adaptations.
Thornton Wilder also wrote
librettos for several operas.
Reading sheet music was his
hobby.
And we handed the story of, he
was an actor in Our Town and The
Skin of Our Teeth.
Here he is in, of course, Our
Town.
Two weeks on Broadway and then
in summer stock.
The story of a soldier in both
wars briefly, and in the second
World War from captain to
lieutenant colonel in North
Africa and in the Italian
campaign in Air Force
intelligence.
Greatly influenced, of course,
his work and ideas after the
war.
And I mentioned the traveler.
Here he is traveling again all
over the place.
Finally we've handed, and I'm
going to move really quickly,
the story of a family.
Here are the four kids born in
Madison, and here they are with
Madison and the nurse in the
back.
About 1901, probably 1900, 1901.
You're going to meet them
quickly.
My father, Amos Niven Wilder,
the earliest picture we have of
him in Madison to which we
think.
I just found that recently.
I wanted you to see it.
He and my father became a
biblical scholar, poet, literary
critic, and a recent book
published about Wilder and the
brother on the question of
religion.
This was just two years ago by
Notre Dame Press.
My father also was the jock of
the family.
At his death, he was the oldest
living man in the world who ever
played on the center court at
Wimbledon.
And he ended up in People
magazine, which was a first for
the professor of divinity in
the Harvard Divinity School.
He was an ordained minister.
The sister, Charlotte, here we
have her in the late teens, not
sure of the date.
Perhaps about to go to Mount
Holyoke, a poet and a teacher.
Charlotte, this is one of her
two books.
Long series of difficult
emotional problems that end in
what we call a breakdown in '41
and eventually a prefrontal
lobotomy, and she is going to
live until 1980 in an
institutional setting.
Her story is part of the
Thornton Wilder story too.
And Isabelle Wilder, Dick, whom
you may remember.
A novelist in her own right who
later took on the care and
feeding of her brother.
And took care of the house, took
care of him, became his closest
assistant.
This is one of her novels, one
of her three novels in the '30s.
The author is the sister of
Thornton Wilder.
Pressure.
And, finally, Janet, the
youngest child.
The honest one, we say.
Janet was a zoologist who lived
her life in Amherst from 1910
and dies in 1982.
She wrote a book too at the end
of her life.
She had the world's champion
Morgan or the national champion
Morgan, and she wrote The Life
of Jeffy.
There's the mother who raised
these children.
Bought to them an enormous love
of literature.
Care and feeding.
The complicated father, a
monster of purity.
A monster of purity who tried to
organize their life every day
and move them around like chess
players.
Of those five kids, only the
youngest, Janet and my father
married.
Only my father had children.
So my sister and I, and I have a
daughter, a wonderful daughter
in Salt Lake, are all that we
have left.
I'm going to sort of bring this
to an end by turning this over
to Penny.
I don't want to talk anymore.
I want to end on two things.
I come back to Our Town.
This is a recent production in
Japan.
This is a recent production in
Poland.
From the beginning, Our Town was
an international play.
It was done eight times within,
I think, the first two years,
including Japan.
Later in Spain during the war.
These were all illegal or
pirated productions, but there
they were real.
Isn't it interesting.
And Thornton Wilder was reaching
for that.
And I think today, in the raw
times in which we live, that's
one of the reasons Our Town is
doing so well, why Thornton
Wilder is so current and why he
is increasingly read and
appreciated because life is so
raw.
But it's also this wonderful
international thing which is
where we are.
So I'm preaching the gospel of
how reading Wilder today is to
appreciate something, a man who
tried to bring people together
rather than to celebrate how
different they were.
Tried to reach all of us with
messages and questions about
what is indeed essential and
rather human.
It seems a little old fashioned,
but I think it's current.
Interesting that the Germans,
for example, who've long
appreciated Wilder, this is the
way they see Our Town.
Unsere kleine Stadt.
It's the Frankfort skyline
depicted.
And that's kind of where we are,
trying to figure out and
celebrate a man, and this is the
complicated, interesting man of
many parts, this rather
complicated family that we
turned over to Penny Niven some
years ago with tons of paper
endlessly appearing everywhere
because we kept finding linear
feet, Dick, of papers that we
had overlooked.
And she just loved it.
And here you are, Penny.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Every time I hear Tappan
Wilder speak about Thornton
Wilder, I learn at least six
more facts that I will put in
the second edition of this
biography.
It's great to be with you here
in Janesville tonight.
Thornton Wilder had a birthday
yesterday.
He would have been 116 years
old.
So, we celebrated his birthday
and we celebrate his work and we
celebrate the fact that people
are gathering in places all over
this country and elsewhere to
discover or rediscover the work
of Thornton Wilder.
Who is this man behind the play
and behind the novel?
What are the challenges that
confront his biographers?
Some years ago, I was working on
a biography of Carl Sandburg, my
first biography, my daughter was
going into middle school, and on
the first day of school, her
teacher asked about her parents.
And my Jennifer said, "My father
works at the college, and my
mother is obsessed with this
dead guy."
[LAUGHTER]
Which I think is an apt
description of what it is a
biographer does and the
motivation that a biographer
needs in order to do her work.
My subjects have been outsiders.
They've been rebels who reshaped
their art forms.
Carl Sandburg transformed
American poetry and biography
and children's literature.
James Earl Jones has, by the way
my very much alive guy, I'm
happy to say, James Earl Jones
has broken barriers in theater,
and at the age of 82, he's still
doing that.
He is, as I speak, in Australia
on a six-month tour with Angela
Lansbury doing Driving Miss
Daisy.
He's 82 and she's more than 82.
More than a century ago, Edward
Steichen, the photographer who
was Sandburg's brother-in-law,
helped to campaign to prove that
photography can be a fine art.
And Thornton Wilder created
plays and novels that I think in
many cases are still far ahead
of their time, and they still
speak to a global audience.
Now, as a biographer of Wilder,
it's been my privilege to work
with these multitudes and
mountains of papers.
Sometimes, I confess, along the
way I have thought next time I
will write biography of a writer
who lived to be 25.
[LAUGHTER]
Wrote one book and only
communicated by email which
he deleted after he received it.
But it's been a wonderful
enthralling, fascinating
challenge, an obsession if you
will, to explore Wilder's life,
the life behind the work.
Who is this man who created The
Bridge and Our Town?
The finest bridge in all Peru in
1714 was constructed entirely in
Thornton Wilder's imagination.
And so it was that universal
mythical village of Grover's
Corners, New Hampshire.
How can one man's imagination
transport us from fiction to
drama and back again, inventing
all the way?
Pulitzer Prizes and other awards
and thousands of people around
the globe have affirmed the
significance of Wilder's bridge
and Wilder's town, but not many
people have known very much
about the man.
And thanks to Tappan and his
sister Catharine Wilder, we can
have the access to the evidence
that we need in order to try to
understand that life, to
document that life, and to
connect that life to the work.
I could tell you some things for
certain about Thornton Wilder.
For example, I could tell you
that while he was a global
citizen, he was proud of being
from the Midwest.
He wrote to another Midwestern
writer, the novelist James
Herlihy who was from Detroit,
and Wilder said, and this is in
1967, "Yes, you and I are Middle
Westerners.
I left my birthplace, Madison,
Wisconsin, at the age of nine
but returned for two years at
Oberlin College and then for
six years teaching at the
University of Chicago.
But more than that," he said,
"we have a feeling about the
Middle West middle class that is
not often found.
We don't hate it or mock it or
sentimentalize it as Booth
Tarkington did.
We don't condescend to it as
Sinclair Lewis does.
It is, as it were, romantic for
us.
We rejoice in the whole gamut
from farce to tragedy."
He also mentions Our Town in
this same letter.
He says, "My New Hampshire
village is pure imagination.
I tutored in summer camps and I
was a guest at the MacDowell
Colony, but I seldom entered
homes.
I took late night strolls and I
looked through windows.
I lingered in stores and post
offices.
I looked and I listened."
Because of the magnitude of
Wilder's surviving papers, I
always said to my daughter if
you don't hear from me for two
or three days and you can't find
me, just look under the papers
in the writing room.
But because of that wonderful
magnitude and abundance of the
surviving papers, from his
childhood until his death we can
witness, close up, his search
for his own subjects, his search
for literary form, his search
for his own true self.
He left a richly detailed record
of his life-long education, much
of it self-propelled.
He left revealing portraits of
his family and the pivotal
people in his life.
So this biography concentrates
on his history as a writer, a
phrase he often used to describe
other writers.
Concentrates on the drama of his
inner life, but it's also very
much a family saga.
These Wilders wrote
prolifically, letters, journals
in many cases, manuscripts of
course, and they seem to me to
have saved almost everything.
And I'm so fortunate that they
did.
We're all fortunate that they
did.
Wilder was the star in the
family, if you will, but there
were strong supporting roles
played by his father, his
mother, and his siblings,
Tappan's father Amos, and my
judgment, merits his own
biography.
And his papers are almost as
vast in their numbers as
Thornton's are.
Thornton was a twinless twin.
His twin brother died at birth.
He had a sense of solitude and
incompletion that often
accompanies the twinless twin.
Amos Niven Wilder writes a good
deal about that.
From the time Thornton was nine
until he was 22, the Wilder
family lived scattered around
the globe.
Some members of the family on
one continent, some on another.
It was most often a financial
imperative that dictated that
geographical separation, but the
family was bound together by
letters.
In many ways, I think perhaps
those family bonds were
strengthened and intensified by
the letters.
The regular, usually Sunday
afternoon, long detailed letters
to others.
So we can read Thornton's own
words from the time he was a boy
until just a couple of weeks
before his death.
It's the most extraordinary
documentary record of a
childhood and a young adulthood
of an emerging artist that I've
ever seen.
The challenge in this book has
been several fold.
The first thing I discovered
early on is that Thornton Wilder
did not have a very high opinion
of biography.
[LAUGHTER]
So he wrote at some length about
how to write biography and how
not to write biography.
I have certainly paid close
attention to that.
I have heeded his warning or his
urging that you need to pay
primary attention to what your
subject says.
And thank goodness with the
Wilder record, I've been able to
adhere closely to that.
I suppose the first step in
biography, other than being born
with a love of papers, as Tappan
mentions, is to have an instinct
for research.
You have to be a literary
detective constantly on the look
out for evidence of the life.
And you find countless facts in
thousands and thousands of pages
of letters and journals,
manuscripts, documents.
You search the FBI files and
other government files.
You live in libraries and
museums and archives.
You double check and triple
check all of the evidence you're
uncovering.
I often talk to children and
young people about writing
biography, and I was doing that
in an elementary school in
Indiana one day.
At the end of my talk, I asked
for questions.
One little girl raised her hand
and said, "I have just decided
I'm going to be a writer when I
grow up.
It sounds like so much more fun
than working."
[LAUGHTER]
And I agree with her that it's
a great deal of fun, but it's
the hardest work I've ever done.
As I've written Thornton Wilder:
A Life, I've faced three primary
challenges.
First of all, dealing with the
sheer magnitude of the papers.
I expected that there would be
numerous Thornton Wilder papers.
I frankly had no idea that there
were going to be so many Amos
Parker Wilder papers and
Isabella Niven Wilder papers and
Amos Niven Wilder papers, not to
mention Isabelle, Charlotte, and
Janet's papers, the three
sisters.
As Tappan has told you, Thornton
Wilder was a man of many parts,
many facets.
So there was all that complexity
to deal with.
So that was the second
challenge, writing a biography
about a multi-dimensional man.
Third has been the imperative of
correcting the record, trying to
document the historical
biographical record.
There are earlier biographies of
Thornton Wilder, but those
biographers did not have access
to the full range of the
material for a number of
reasons.
One of them being that Isabelle
Wilder was planning to write her
own book and was at work on that
until very late in her life.
So she had kept a certain number
of papers aside for her own use,
and she also been very careful
about some of the papers that
she and her co-executor opened
to the scholarly public.
So with the advent of Tappan and
Catharine, the world opened, the
windows were lifted, and the
doors had the welcome mat, and I
certainly have benefited from
that.
There are, because of the lack
of access earlier, there are
errors and misconceptions in the
public record.
So it's been part of my mission
and the mission, I think, of the
executors to have that record
corrected, to have that record
illuminated, to rediscover
Thornton Wilder in the light of
this new day.
I am also very grateful to have
had generous access, permission
to quote lavishly, which I have
done in the book, so that the
Wilders, particularly Thornton,
can tell you the story.
You can hear Thornton in his own
voice.
I don't have to tell you second
or third hand about it.
You can hear, from his journals
particularly and also from his
letters, what he has to say.
One of the most striking facets
of this man is the continual
evolution, not only his
continual growth and searching
and evolution as an artist but
the parallel, equally intense
evolution and continuous growth
of the man in search of what
really matters in the human
existence.
So this is evident in these
marvelous journals, many of them
unpublished, and I've been so
grateful to have the opportunity
to share that with you in the
book.
I've also had total independence
to write freely.
So anything wrong in this book
is my sole responsibility.
Nobody has looked over my
shoulder any step of the way,
and this is vital, I think, to
the integrity of the work of the
biographer.
So, we know a great deal more
about Thornton in this 21st
century.
We rediscover or discover his
work.
We know that very early on the
instinct of the playwright was
evident.
He was a little boy in Madison
when he saw his first play.
His mother took him to
Milwaukee.
He sat in the balcony with his
mother and saw As You Like It
and fell in love instantly with
the theater.
So it started quite early.
He was, as a child, creating and
producing plays in the backyard.
As a teenager bored in his
algebra class, he began writing
three-minute plays for three
characters, a discipline he
imposed on himself.
By the time he was in college he
was a serious dramatist.
And there are forerunners
foreshadowing Our Town, and
there are wonderful major plays
that come after that.
He's still experimenting to the
end of his life with theater.
He loved to make up stories as
well as plays, and I think it's
quite interesting to see that
his career is book-ended with
novels.
The Cabala and The Bridge of San
Luis Rey come first in the
career.
The Bridge gives him his
overnight success and fame and
visibility, and then The Eighth
Day and Theophilus North round
out the career.
But his first and most enduring
love is, in my judgment, is
theater.
However, it was the novel that
gave him the worldwide fame.
When he wrote The Bridge, as you
probably know, he had never been
to Peru except in that
imagination and in the books
that he read.
He would not get there until
1941.
When he wrote Our Town, he had
spent time, of course, in New
England, but he invented
Grover's Corners.
Tappan showed you the house that
Thornton built for his family.
Nobody was more surprised than
Thornton that he'd made all that
money so quickly.
His father probably was second
most surprised because his
father thought he would never
amount to anything.
He was such a dreamer and a
dilettante, and Papa Wilder had
cautioned Amos, the older
brother, that he needed to be
prepared to support Thornton
because Thornton was never going
to have a job with benefits and
an insurance policy.
So it was a kind of wonderful
surprise to everybody when this
happened, when this transpired,
and it happens again with Our
Town.
I was a teenager back in Waxhaw,
North Carolina, when I first
read Our Town, and I was
positive that Thornton Niven
Wilder had written Our Town
about Waxhaw.
I knew those people, I knew
those events, and I also was
intrigued by the fact that my
last name was Niven and
Thornton's middle name was
Niven.
When my little sister Doris was
five years old, somebody asked
her if David Niven, the actor,
was our father.
And Doris said, not that we know
of.
[LAUGHTER]
And I used to say that when
people asked me if I'm related
to Thornton Wilder.
Tappan and I put our Niven
family histories together
several years ago and
discovered, to our surprise,
that his Niven family and my
Niven family came from the same
little village of 600 people in
a village called Bowmore on
Islay off the west coast of
Scotland.
So we figured that there might
be some connection in a little
town of that size.
The genealogical research
continued and a little over a
year ago we found the link.
His name is Malcolm MacNiven.
He was born about 1715 on Islay.
He had four sons: Daniel,
Duncan, Archibald, and Neil.
Thornton Niven Wilder is a
descendent of Malcolm's son
Duncan.
My Niven family and I are
descendents of Malcolm's son
Archibald.
So we share that grandfather all
those generations back, and we
are planning a joint pilgrimage
to Islay in 2014, we think.
You're all invited to come.
[LAUGHTER]
We'll get the details to you.
As you read and experience
Wilder's novels and his plays,
especially Our Town, pay
attention to what Wilder has to
say about family.
His own family, the families in
his fiction, the families in his
drama, the great human family.
Family was a central theme and
preoccupation of Wilder, and he
called himself the poet laureate
of the family.
As you read The Bridge and as
you watch Our Town, listen and
watch what he has to say about
the many variations of love,
about the role of the artist in
our lives, about the enduring
questions that are inherant in
the thoughtful human being.
Wilder insisted that The Bridge
was a novel of unanswered
questions.
Questions that many of us
explore in our lives.
And he wrote to a student, the
play, the novel, my work is not
supposed to solve problems.
It's not supposed to answer
problems.
He says about The Bridge, the
book is supposed to be puzzling,
supposed to be as distressing as
the news that five of your
friends died in an automobile
accident.
Chekhov said the business of
literature is not to answer
questions, but to state them
fairly.
He received baskets of mail
about The Bridge, and he
answered as often as he could.
Somebody said is The Bridge
symbolic?
And Wilder said yes, think about
it.
Somebody said the novel does not
state a moral, or does the novel
state a moral?
And Wilder repeated, the novel
asks questions without
answering.
The primary question, he says,
is there a direction and meaning
that lies beyond the
individual's own will?
I'm going to conclude by
summarizing concisely a
wonderful letter that Thornton
Wilder wrote to a 15-year-old
teenager who had to write a book
report on The Bridge of San Luis
Rey.
And it turns out that Thornton
and Isabelle are on board a ship
from New York bound for England
at the same time that
15-year-old John and his mother
and father are on the ship.
They arrange to meet Thornton
and Isabelle.
The teenager confesses that he
has got to read this book and
write a book report to take to
his teacher when school starts
in the fall, and could
Mr. Wilder help him with his
homework?
And Mr. Wilder says he'd be
happy to, and Mr. Wilder winds
up writing the book report.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm going to read you just
a couple of paragraphs of
Thornton Wilder's book report
on his own novel, The Bridge,
which so many of you are
reading.
The book report begins:
"Mr. Wilder," so this is
Mr. Wilder writing about himself
in the third person,
"Mr. Wilder's book is in the
form of a question.
It is a question that we ask
many times a year when we read
about accidents in the paper.
The friends and relatives of
those who have died in accidents
must often put the question to
themselves: was there some
intention or meaning or reason
in the fact that that particular
person should die at that
particular moment?
It does not seem to me that
Mr. Wilder gives a clear answer.
I don't think he meant to give
one.
He wished each reader to find
his own answer from his own
experience.
Since Mr. Wilder wrote the book
in 1927, the question has taken
on a new and larger form.
Suppose that not one individual,
nor a large number of
individuals, but the whole human
race should be extinguished by
the newly discovered weapons of
atomic warfare.
What would be the answer then to
the question as to whether one
could find an intention, a
reason, or a meaning in that
total destruction?
At first glance it would appear
that there's no connection
between the victims of
circumstance, the breaking of a
bridge, and the victims of human
violence."
And he goes on to comment in a
very powerful way on the reason,
the purpose, if there is one,
for violence in the human
experience.
At this point, I think, had I
been John's teacher, I would
have perhaps suspected that John
had had a little help with his
homework.
[LAUGHTER]
Mr. Wilder goes on with his
book report.
He says to John, add this
paragraph toward the end of your
paper.
And the paragraph is this: "in
retrospect, let the master
advise us all on the murderous
impulses of the human being.
I know that every good and
excellent thing in the world
stands moment by moment on the
razor edge of danger and must be
fought for.
And hope, hope, like faith, is
nothing if it is not courageous,
and it's nothing if it is not
ridiculous.
And love from the bridge.
We ourselves shall be loved for
a while and forgotten, but the
love will have had been enough.
All those impulses of love
return to the love that made
them.
Even memory is not necessary for
love.
There is a land of the living
and a land of the dead, and the
bridge is love, the only
survival, the only meaning."
Wilder concludes his book report
as follows.
"On my approach to life, my
advice to you is not to inquire
why or whether, as Thornton
Wilder has done all of his life,
but simply enjoy your ice cream
while it's on your plate."
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]