THE WORKS OF Thornton Wilder www.HarperAcademic.com merican playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder possessed what some critics have called the first interplanetary mind. Because he explored universal themes, his plays and novels are as relevant in the A twenty-first century as they were in the twentieth. In addition to their appeal to the general reader, the nine new Harper Perennial Modern Classics editions of Thornton Wilder’s major plays and his novels are especially useful in the classroom. Each volume offers a new Foreword by a noted contemporary writer that explores the relevance of Wilder’s voice in a new century. Each volume also includes an Afterword by Tappan Wilder, Wilder’s nephew and literary executor, containing excerpts from Thornton Wilder’s pub- lished and previously unpublished letters and manuscripts, along with rare commentary, interviews, photographs and other illustrations. This material is designed to offer readers, teachers and students an opportunity to look into unknown corners of each literary work and of Wilder’s life. The HarperCollins academic website (www.HarperAcademic.com) provides reading and study guides for many Harper Perennial Modern Classics editions. The Cabala and The Woman of Andros Two Novels (1926 and 1930) “ From the earliest pages of his first novels and plays, Wilder examined the universal quandaries encapsulated in the questions the young man Pamphilus asks in The Woman of Andros: ‘How does one live? What does one do first?’” —Penelope Niven, Foreword to The Cabala and The Woman of Andros Thornton Wilder invited readers into a global arena when he set each of his first three novels in exotic times and places—Italy, Peru and Greece. Of the three destinations, he had spent nearly a year as a student in Italy, but he had yet to visit Peru or Greece, except in an imagination informed by the rich traditions of classical and European literature, including writers as varied as Terence (190–158 B.C.) and Marcel Proust (1871–1922). No matter where and when Wilder’s novels take place, his characters grapple with universal questions about the nature of human existence. Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 288 pp. In Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala (1926), Samuele, an American 2007 9780060518578 pb, $13.95 ($17.99/CAN) student, spends a year in the fabulously decadent world of post-World War I Rome. He experiences first-hand the waning days of a secret community— a “cabala” composed of decaying European royalty, eccentric expatriate Americans, even a great cardinal of the Roman Church. The vivid portraits he paints of these characters, whom he views as the vestigial representatives of the gods and goddesses of Ancient Rome, launched Thornton Wilder’s career as a celebrated storyteller and literary stylist. His best-selling novel The Woman of Andros (1930), set before the birth of Christ on an obscure Greek island, tells the story of the enigmatic Chrysis, a courtesan (and an outcast) of haunting beauty and intelligence. In her gatherings with the young men of the island, Chrysis probes what is precious about life, and how we live, love, and die in a harsh world, themes that Wilder revisited eight years later in his play, Our Town. Pamphilus, the only son of a prominent villager, fathers a baby out of wedlock with Chrysis’s sister, whom he wants to marry. The questions faced by Pamphilus, his family and the other “respectable” citizens of the island also explore themes of social class and status. THEMES AND TOPICS FOR EXPLORATION LITERARY ELEMENTS FOR EXAMINATION Wilder’s statement: “Perhaps the principal theme is the In The Cabala: The use of the first person narrator; ele- theme of all my books: namely, when a situation is more ments of irony and satire; the meaning of supernatural ele- than a human should can be expected to bear, what then?” ments in the last chapter, “The Dusk of the Gods.” Chrysis’s view that life’s most difficult burden is “the In The Woman Of Andros: The purpose and significance incommunicability of love.” of parables, fable and aphorisms; the contemplative style; the foreshadowing of Our Town; the uses of description and Wilder’s publisher’s assertion that The Woman of Andros dialogue; how and why, as Wilder said, he turned Terence’s is “the study of the inner life of a few characters passing “riotous comedy into a reflective tragedy.” through circumstances that are common to domestic life in all times and places.” “ The train that first carried me into Rome was late, overcrowded and cold.” —First line of The Cabala “ The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness. .”—First line of The Woman of Andros 3 The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Edited by Robin G. Wilder & Jackson R. Bryer (2008) “Wilder’s writing is sharply etched and generous of spirit. [In Selected Letters] he consistently discharges the obligation he imposed on his correspondents: that their letters ‘intimate the alterations of climate in their hearts and minds.’” —Times Literary Supplement (London) Though smaller collections have been published previously, The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder is the most comprehensive and authoritative col- lection of the writer’s correspondence to date. Edited by Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, this meticulously curated volume contains more than three hundred letters, selected from some 7,000 Wilder wrote over the span of his life. These letters offer an intimate introduction to Thornton Wilder, the quintessential American Man of Letters. The collection, divided into six sections, chronicles his life as a boy growing up in China and California, a teenager spending his summers working on farms, a young man studying at Harper: 768 pp. Oberlin College and Yale, and a schoolmaster teaching and writing plays and 2008 9780060765071 hc, $39.95 ($42.95/CAN) novels. Students can read the first-person account of his adventures, from 38 b/w photos throughout roller skating with Walt Disney and attending an inaugural reception for Harper Perennial: 768 pp. FDR, to dining out with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. 2009 9780060765088 pb, $19.99 ($25.99/CAN) Aside from his own cultural accomplishments as the only writer to 38 b/w photos throughout win the Pulitzer Prize in both drama and fiction, Thornton Wilder was a public figure, known as the man who knew everybody. These letters chronicle his correspondence with notable cultural figures including Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Noel Coward, Max Reinhardt, Gene Tunney, Alexander Woollcott, Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, Aaron Copeland, Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, and Mia Farrow. By presenting letters to his family and friends, this volume is an essential complement to any in-depth study of the author’s life, offering students a glimpse at the private thoughts of the famed author. As one who never wrote an autobiog- raphy, these letters act as the definitive account of Wilder’s life. Students and educators alike will turn to this collection to understand the man behind some of the most enduring and experimental literary works of the twentieth century. “ Letters are the only form in all literature, in all the arts, which reposes on the communication of one to one. It is this condition which renders [them] the pre-eminent vehicle for that aspect of life which is gener- ally excluded from all literature except the novel: those innumerable trifles of the daily life, that rain of trifling details, pleasing and vexatious, which falls upon the just and the unjust and which is also an ines- capable concomitant of all human life.” —Thornton Wilder, Journals, August 20, 1951 4 The Bridge Of San Luis Rey A Novel (1927) “One merely has to consider the central question raised by the novel, which, according to Wilder himself, was simply: ‘Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individ- ual’s own will?’ It is perhaps the largest and most profoundly personal philosophical inquiry that we can undertake. It is the question that defines us as human beings.” —Russell Banks, Foreword to The Bridge of San Luis Rey “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” So begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the great achievements in American literature, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a novel still read throughout the world. By chance, Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, witnesses the trag- edy. He then embarks on a six-year-long quest to determine whether it was divine intervention or happenstance that led to the deaths of the five victims—the Marquesa de Montemayor, obsessed with regaining the affec- HarperCollins: 160 pp. tions of her estranged daughter; young Pepita, a humble and lonely orphan 2004 9780060580612 hc, $19.99 ($25.99/CAN) assigned by the local Abbess to be the companion of the aging Marquesa; the Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 160 pp. grief-stricken Esteban, mourning the untimely death of his identical twin, 2003 9780060088873 pb, $12.99 ($16.99/CAN) Manuel; Uncle Pio, who has recently taken seven-year-old Jaime into his care as a way of maintaining a lost relationship with the boy’s mother, Camila, once the greatest actress of her day. Brother Juniper’s search for answers leads him to more questions, and, ultimately, to his own death. “There are a hundred ways of wondering at circumstance,” Wilder writes, challenging the reader to question and to wonder about a story that novelist Russell Banks says in his Foreword is “as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature.” THEMES AND TOPICS FOR EXPLORATION LITERARY ELEMENTS FOR STUDY The questions of whether there is direction and meaning in The novel as fable and allegory; point of view and other life beyond the individual’s own will; the role of women in techniques that establish and reveal character in fiction; the the novel; the literary relationship between the Marquesa writer’s style and voice; use of setting in the novel as both and Mme.