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Thornton Wilder
 Born
in the city called the Berkley of the Midwest, Thornton Wilder introduced
himself to the world in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897. He became
famous as a novelist and playwright and is best known for writing
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
Our Town, and
The Skin of Our Teeth. His twin brother died at birth,
and Wilder grew up with an older brother, Amos Niven, and three younger sisters,
Charlotte, Isabel, and Janet.
 As
a member of a talented and industrious family, Wilder lived for a while in
China. Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper owner and editor, was U.S. consul
general to Hong Kong and Shanghai, while Wilder's older brother, Amos Niven,
was a well regarded professor of New Testament scholarship, an inspirational
essayist, and a distinguished poet. He was also well regarded by the
ladies around the tennis courts.
Of Wilder's sisters, Charlotte became a professor of English
and an award-winning poet. Isabel was the author of three popular novels
and the curator of Yale University's theater archive. The youngest Wilder
sibling, Janet Wilder Dakin, was a professor of biology, an author, and a
noted environmentalist.
As a boy, young Wilder grew up near a university theater
that performed Greek dramas, and his mother let him participate as a member
of the chorus. He never forgot the experience and vowed that someday
he would write for the theater.
When he finished high school after moving to California,
Wilder attended Oberlin College in Ohio, after which he received his undergraduate
degree at Yale and his graduate degree at Princeton. He wrote his first
play, The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), while he was still a Yalie.
 After
being graduated from college, Wilder's father sent his son to Rome, where
he worked on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Roman ruins.
He later said, "Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of
a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled
highway, you are never quite the same again." The experience inspired
him to begin writing fiction about characters caught up in the forces of fate
and history. His second novel,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), was about a group of unrelated
characters who are all killed by the collapse of a bridge in Peru. It
was a roaring critical success, and it earned him the
Pulitzer Prize.
 While
Wilder was working at the University of Chicago, he began experimenting with
a series of one-act plays that used nearly no scenery or props. They
included a muse-like character called the Stage Manager who knew everything
about the story and characters. In 1938, Wilder produced the play for
which he is best known,
Our Town, one of the first major Broadway plays to use minimal
scenery so that the audience had to imagine the world in which the characters
lived. Wilder said, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind—not
in things, not in 'scenery'....[A play] needs only five square feet of boarding
and a passion to know what life means to us."
 Our
Town is about the New England village of Grover's Corners,
where characters George Gibbs and Emily Webb grow up, fall in love at the
local soda fountain, and marry. As Emily lies dying while giving birth
to their first child, she relives the day of her twelfth birthday and realizes
how little she cherished life while she was alive: "Do any human beings ever
realize life while they live it,—every, every minute?" The play ran
for 336 performances on Broadway and won another Pulitzer Prize.
Wilder went on to write numerous plays, screenplays, and novels. Near
the end of his life, he realized that he might not be remembered as well as
some writers who had written darker stories, but he said, "My advice to you
is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's
on your plate."
 By
the time Thornton Wilder died on December 7, 1975, at his home in Hamden,
Connecticut, he was already an American icon, an internationally famous playwright,
and a novelist. To this day, his works are read, performed, and appreciated
by audiences worldwide.
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