Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Thornton Wilder: A Life  Penny Niven, et al  4/18/13 UP860  cc >> 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. 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. 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. 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]