Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is
not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire
to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is
nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.
—Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder: A Life, the first biography of the
playwright and novelist since 1983, is also the first to be
based on thousands of pages of letters, journals,
manuscripts, and other documentary evidence of Wilder's
life, work, and times. For more than a decade, biographer
Penelope Niven has worked with unprecedented access to
Wilder's papers, including his family's private journals and
records, searching for the secrets that illuminate Wilder's
public life and work, as well as the hidden inner self
sometimes concealed and sometimes revealed in his art and in
his papers.
Thornton Wilder was a multifaceted man: a teacher, novelist,
playwright, lecturer, actor, musician, soldier, man of
letters, outspoken citizen, and international public figure.
He was also an enigmatic, intensely private man. He belonged
to a close-knit, complicated family—two brilliant parents,
four gifted siblings, and the specter of his twin brother
lost at birth. His biography is also a compelling family
saga, starring Thornton Wilder, with strong supporting roles
played by his father, mother, brother, and sisters.
He was a gypsy, wandering the world, writing, he said, for
and about everybody—a fact international audiences still
embrace. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Eighth Day, and his
other novels are still read in the United States and abroad.
His plays, especially the iconic Our Town and the
revolutionary Skin of Our Teeth, are still performed on
stages around the globe.
Yet despite the international fame and visibility of Wilder
the writer, far too little has been known or understood
about Wilder the man—until now. Comprehensively researched
and richly detailed, Thornton Wilder: A Life brings the
private man center stage and sheds new light on his
published and unpublished work.
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