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Home , Theophilus North, The Eighth Day (novel), The Woman of Andros, Thornton Wilder

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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 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Wilder, Wilder’s nephew and literary executor, containing excerpts from Thornton Wilder’s pub- lished and previously unpublished letters and manuscripts, along with rare commentary, interviews, photographs and other illustrations.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 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, 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 (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, . 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, 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. 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 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 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, , Noel Coward, , , , , , , , Aaron Copeland, , Leonard Bernstein, , 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 [] 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. de Sévigné; the varieties of love; love as “the only particular and universal. survival, the only meaning.”

“ Some say that we shall never know [how to “justify the ways of God to man”] and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”—From The Bridge of San Luis Rey

5 Heaven’s My Destination A Novel (1935)

“ If ’s mighty Grapes of Wrath is the tragic novel of the Great Depression, then Heaven’s My Destination is its comic masterpiece. . . . Heaven’s My Destination, Wilder’s funniest novel, is a comedy of American manners, a pageant of absurdities and miracles, logic and belly laughs, a truly sophisticated, at times even unsettling, corn-belt clas- sic.” —J. D. McClatchy, Foreword to Heaven’s My Destination Thornton Wilder’s best-selling comic novel, published in 1935, is a timeless exploration of the American drive for self-improvement in the individual and society—the conviction that we should, can and will make all things better. Wilder draws on multiple sources in the creation of one of his most earnest and outrageous characters, George Marvin Brush, traveling book salesman and teetotaling religious fundamentalist, who is determined to lead a thor- oughly ethical life, and encourages everyone else to do the same. Wilder finds inspiration for his George Brush in Bunyan’s Christian Harper Perennial: 240 pp. pilgrim and ’s Stephen Dedalus, among other characters in the 2003 9780060088897 pb, $14.95 ($18.99/CAN) rich picaresque tradition in literature. But no source was more important than Cervante’s great figure, Don Quixote. George Brush is a modern Don Quixote come to Main Street in the middle of the Great Depression. A hilarious series of misadventures unfolds for Brush as he wanders through smoking cars, bawdy houses, banks, boardinghouses and campgrounds from Texas to Illinois. As he searches for perfection and proselytizes everyone he meets—even a burglar in the midst of an armed robbery—George gets arrested, becomes mysteriously ill, finds the woman he once dishonored, marries her and then loses her again, and so on and so forth. In the end, he is a wiser man, but no committed to his goals of living an ethical life, and bringing people the “good news.” Thornton Wilder believed that “George Brush at his best is everybody,” suggesting that there is in each of us, espe- cially when we are young, a George Brush who wants to change the world and do good–or at least do better.

THEMES AND TOPICS FOR EXPLORATION ELEMENTS FOR LITERARY STUDY The “can do” aspects of the American character; the Self The picaresque novel; the journey or pilgrimage as a plot Improvement Movement in the United States, including the device; the use of conflict in the comedic plot; satire, farce Chautauqua and Lyceum traditions; the novel’s depiction and comedy as social commentary; the American Adam. of the Great Depression; the relationship between religious faith and ethical practice; the individual and the search for his/her relationship to society.

“ I didn’t put myself through college for four years and go through a different religious conversion in order to have ideas like other people’s.”—George Brush in Heaven’s My Destination

6 Our Town A Play in Three Acts (1938)

“ Indeed, the play’s success across cultural borders around the world attests to its being something much greater than an American play: it is a play that captures the universal experience of being alive.” — in the Foreword to Our Town Our Town explores the relationship between two young Grover’s Corners neighbors, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship blossoms into romance, and then culminates in marriage. When Emily loses her life in childbirth, the circle of life portrayed in each of the three acts of Our Town—growing up, adulthood, and death—is fully realized. This timeless drama of life in the mythical village of Grover’s Corners, , has become an American classic with universal appeal. Thornton Wilder’s most frequently performed play, Our Town appeared on Broadway in 1938 to wide acclaim, won the Pulitzer Prize, and to this day is produced in amateur and professional theaters around the world. HarperCollins: 208 pp. Wilder offers a couple of chairs on a bare stage as the backdrop for 2003 9780060535254 hc, $19.99 ($23.99/CAN) an exploration of the universal human experience. This simple story of a love Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 208 pp. affair is constantly rediscovered because it asks timeless questions about the 2003 9780060512637 pb, $12.99 ($16.9/CAN) meaning of love, life and death. In the final moments of the play, the recently deceased Emily is granted the opportunity to revisit one day in her life, only to discover that she never fully appreciated all she possessed until she lost it. “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” she says as she takes her place among the dead. The Afterword of this important new edition contains more than fifty pages of material designed to introduce old and new fans of this famous work to its roots and its evolution, and to explain why, as Donald Margulies suggests in his Foreword, it may be “Possibly, the great American play.”

THEMES AND TOPICS FOR EXPLORATION LITERARY ELEMENTS FOR STUDY The universal themes revealed in the individual life; each Wilder’s innovations in staging, characterization, and life as “an allegorical representation of all life,” as Wilder dialogue; the purpose and uses of the Stage Manager; the said; the dynamics of family and other relationships; the concept of the Fourth Wall; Wilder’s views, expressed in core question of the nature and meaning of life and death; his 1938 Preface, about why “The stage has a deceptive playwrights who influenced Wilder, and playwrights influ- advantage over the novel. . . .” enced by Wilder.

“ So—people a thousand years from now—this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”—Stage Manager, Our Town, Act I

7 A Play (1942)

“ For an American dramatist, all roads lead back to Thornton Wilder. . . . The Skin of Our Teeth was a remarkable gift to an America entrenched in catastrophe, a tribute to the trait of human endurance.” —, Foreword, The Skin of Our Teeth Completed by the author a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the for Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire, and elements of the comic strip, Thornton Wilder depicts an Everyman Family as it narrowly escapes one end-of-the-world disaster after another, from the Ice Age to flood to war. Meet George and Maggie Antrobus of Excelsior, New Jersey, a sub- urban, commuter-town couple (married for 5,000 years), who bear more than a casual resemblance to that first husband and wife, Adam and Eve; the two Antrobus children, Gladys (perfect in every way, of course) and Henry (who likes to throw rocks and was formerly known as Cain); and their garrulous Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 176 pp. maid, Sabina (the eternal seductress), who takes it upon herself to break out 2003 9780060088934 pb, $11.95 ($15.50/CAN) of character and interrupt the course of the drama at every opportunity (“I don’t understand a word of this play!”). Whether he is inventing the alphabet or merely saving the world from apocalypse, George and his redoubtable family somehow manage to survive—by the skin of their teeth.

THEMES AND TOPICS TO BE EXPLORED LITERARY ELEMENTS TO BE EXAMINED Wilder’s own question about the play, written in his jour- Wilder’s innovations in dramatic form and structure; nal December 2, 1941: “To go back to first principles, what Wilder’s manipulation of time in the play; Wilder’s views does one offer the audience as explanation of man’s endur- on the nature of drama as expressed in “Some Thoughts on ance, aim and consolation?” Wilder’s observation that his Playwriting” [1941], reprinted in this text; Wilder’s influ- play “fixed its thought on the War and the situation of the ence on other playwrights, including Edward Albee, John eternal family under successive catastrophes.” What the Guare, Paula Vogel, Donald Margulies, and others. play says about war, and about how “the eternal family” endures and survives [if it does] “successive catastrophes”; the changing ideas of family and roles within family since when the play was written.

“ This is where you came in. We have to go on for ages and ages, yet. You go home. The end of this play isn’t written yet. Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus! Their heads are full of plans and they’re as confident as the first day they began— and they told me to tell you: good night.”—Sabina to the audience from the concluding lines of The Skin of Our Teeth

8 Three Plays Our Town (1938), The Skin Of Our Teeth (1942), and (1955)

“ The ink is still wet on these three plays because [Thornton Wilder] wrote them with power and love and craft and genius.” —John Guare, Foreword, Three Plays This classic omnibus collection of Wilder’s plays, together with Wilder’s famous Preface, has been continuously in print since 1957. This important new edition is even more useful than its predecessors, offering for the first time an illuminating Foreword by playwright John Guare, and an extensive afterword that provides heretofore unknown information about the rich his- tory of these three revolutionary plays and their author. Our Town, the Pulitzer-Prize winning drama of life in the small New England village of Grover’s Corners, has long been an American classic and an international favorite. George Gibbs and Emily Webb grow up, fall in love, get married, and build a life together, only to have it come to a tragic end when Emily dies in childbirth. Through their lives and the lives of the other inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, Wilder explores the timeless, universal themes of birth, family, love, life and death. Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 496 pp. The Skin of Our Teeth, with its departures from longstanding theat- 2007 9780060512644 pb, $15.99 ($19.99/CAN) rical conventions, won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire, Wilder showcases the extraordinary Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey, as they narrowly survive one cosmic disaster after another, from ancient times to the present. The Matchmaker, Wilder’s uproarious farce about love and money, stars that irrepressible busybody, , who inspired the Broadway musical, Hello, Dolly! Through Dolly’s subtle machinations several unlikely couples come together to find happiness in 19th-century New York.

THEMES AND TOPICS FOR EXPLORATION LITERARY ELEMENTS FOR EXAMINATION In Our Town, the significance and meaning of Wilder’s Wilder’s unconventional dramatic techniques, such as the depiction of the events of family life and daily life “against use of minimal sets, a stage manager/narrator/commentator, the vast dimensions of time and place” (as he stated in his and a movement through time that defies the clock and the Preface to Three Plays); war, as presented in The Skin of calendar; the elements of farce as they appear in The Our Teeth; the “aspirations of the young (and not only of Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker; Wilder’s views, the young) for a fuller, freer participation in life” as expressed in his preface, of “the box-set stage,” and the dif- presented in The Matchmaker; love as depicted in all ferences in “truth” in the novel and “truth” in the drama. three plays.

“ There are some people who say you shouldn’t have any weaknesses at all—no vices. But if a man has no vices, he’s in great danger of making vices out of his virtues, and there’s a spectacle.”—Malachi Stack in The Matchmaker

9 The Ides Of A Novel (1948)

“ [Thornton Wilder] is still popular as, in my opinion, the calmest, least strident, most humane and scholarly and forgiving and playful and avuncular American storyteller of the twentieth century.” —Kurt Vonnegut, Foreword to The Ides of March The Ides of March, Wilder’s best-selling novel of 1948, uses a collection of vividly conceived letters, journal entries, reports, and other documents to explore the charismatic life and momentous times of one of history’s most elusive personalities. The art of the novel practiced in epistolary style allies this work as close to drama as fiction can get. Students will immediately feel that the Caesar of history has come down from his pedestal and joined them in the living room as he grapples with his public and private duties. Wilder surrounds Caesar with a supporting cast that includes Cleopatra, Catullus, Cicero and Clodia. In fact, all Rome comes crowd- ing through these pages—the villas and the slums, the pageantry, beautiful women and brawling young men, friends and conspirators, the forces of good Harper Perennial: 304 pp. and evil, weakness and power, comedy and tragedy. Wilder observed 2003 9780060088903 pb, $12.95 ($18.99/CAN) in his journal in 1950 that “the novelist cannot write a novel which is felt to be an absolutely comic novel or an absolutely tragic novel. From his vast vista, human experience can only be regarded as presenting a synthesis of both.” The Ides of March is Wilder’s enduring synthesis of what Caesar describes in the novel as “the myriad cries of exe- cration and of delight that have been wrung from men in every time.”

THEMES AND TOPICS FOR EXPLORATION ELEMENTS FOR LITERARY STUDY Comparison with other literary treatments of ; The ; the differences between the historical the artist and the state; Wilder’s treatment of the nature novel and the fantasia, as Wilder describes his own work; and manifestations of love and of religion, and the role of Wilder’s innovations with the omniscient narrator; the use fate, destiny and chance in human existence; the meaning of of dramatic elements in fiction. Caesar’s statement that “there is no liberty save in respon- sibility”; Wilder’s treatment of republican and totalitarian political traditions.

“ My Deedja, Deedja, Deedja–Crocodeedja is very unhappy-happy, very happy-unhappy. Happy that she is to see her Deedja on the night of the twelfth, all the night of the twelfth, and unhappy that the night of the twelfth is a thousand years away.”—Cleopatra to Julius Caesar, The Ides of March “ Meantime I scan all that passes without and within me, and particularly love, poetry, and destiny. I now see that I have been putting these questions all my life, but one does not know what one knows, or even what one wishes to know, until one is challenged and must lay down a stake.” —From Caesar’s Journal, The Ides of March

10 A Novel (1967)

“ Untidily, self-delightingly, it brims with wonder and wisdom, and aspires to prophecy. We marvel at a novel of such spiritual ambition and benign flamboyance.” —, Foreword to The Eighth Day On May 26, 1962, Thornton Wilder’s car broke down in Douglas, Arizona, a booming copper mining town on the Mexican border. He was looking for a place to rest and write, far from New York, Paris, London and other sophis- ticated centers of art and culture. The anonymity Douglas offered was just what Wilder needed and wanted, and he stayed on there for some twenty months. He expected to write plays, but instead found himself writing a novel that, four years later, became the best-selling, -winning The Eighth Day, his longest novel by far. In 1902, John Ashley is convicted of the murder of his best friend, Breckenridge Lansing, in the down-at-the-heels mining town of Coaltown, Illinois. Ashley is sentenced to death, but escapes from his guards on the train that bears him toward his execution. The novel traces Ashley’s journey and Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 512 pp. the repercussions of this tragedy in the lives of the Ashley and Lansing 2007 9780060088910 pb, $15.95 ($19.99/CAN) families. This sprawling epic is a family saga, global adventure story, and psychological thriller imbued with mystery, romance and philosophy. “Louisa May Alcott through Dostoevsky is still there; but there’s also Agatha Christie through Stendahl,” Wilder said of his novel. As Tappan Wilder notes in the Afterword, “In fact, Wilder poured everything he knew about human nature and himself and his society into his American epic.” Also evident is Wilder’s global vision, influenced by such international thinkers as Kierkegaard, Freud and Telhard de Chardin.

THEMES AND TOPICS FOR EXPLORATION LITERARY ELEMENTS FOR EXAMINATION The literal and symbolic significance of the eighth day; The epic form in literature, and Wilder’s reason for choos- Wilder’s thesis that “Man is not a final and arrested cre- ing it; as Wilder described them, “the allusions, ‘symbols,’ ation, but is evolving toward higher mental and spiritual musical [themes] that are part of the book’s structural faculties.” The meaning of Wilder’s observation that the organization”; traits in The Eighth Day that led some critics women in the novel “pass through (or are arrested in one or to call it “an old fashioned novel”; Wilder’s use of another of) the successive phases: Artemis–Aphrodite– the omniscient narrator. Hera–to Athene, (if they’re lucky).” The meaning of the final, unpunctuated word of the novel. The reasons why the novel is appreciated in countries such as Russia, Korea and Germany.

“Can a person educate himself, Clem?” “One in a million, maybe.” “Does most of an education come out of books?” “ A man who tried to understand anything without knowing THOSE BOOKS would just be a feathered kangaroo.” —From The Eighth Day

11 A Novel (1973)

“ Theophilus is, let us be frank, a very rich nine-course meal. The postmodern sushi-fed literary sensibility may at first find itself feeling a tad hypoglycemic. But two things will stave off early-onset diabetes. First, there is the sheer zest and energy of the writing. Second, this is a profoundly subversive novel. Theophilus North flies in the face of those who call Wilder an old-fashioned literary bourgeois. He was as bourgeois as one of his models, Moliere.” —Christopher Buckley, Foreword to Theophilus North Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North, an exhausted young teacher seeking new experiences and wanting time to write, ends up in Newport, Rhode Island. To support himself, he takes a series of odd jobs in the fabulous homes of the rich along Ocean Drive. Soon enough, Theophilus, with his thirst for adventure, finds himself playing the roles of tutor, spy, confidant, lover, friend, and enemy as he becomes entangled in intrigues in the homes of the wealthy, and in places peopled by those who Harper Perennial: 432 pp. serve the rich, or live off them, like fortune hunters, journalists, and the 2003 9780060088927 pb, $14.95 ($17.95/CAN) police. Soon Theophilus is everywhere in what Wilder calls the Nine Cities of Newport. He even has an adventure with a sailor’s wife in one of the “cities” far from Ocean Drive. In 1922, Thornton Wilder himself spent several weeks writing his first novel in Newport—and picking up odd jobs along Ocean Drive to pay the bills. In this partly autobiographical novel, which he sometimes described as the imag- ined life of his twin brother who died at birth, Wilder is also writing a about youth and education and the importance of an ever-expanding intellect and spirit —and, of course, a sense of adventure! A best seller when it first appeared in 1973, Theophilus North “brims” as Christopher Buckley writes in his Foreword, “with delight, wit, prodigious learning, voice, bon mots, epigrams, apothegms, aperçus, grace, and yes, what a lot of lovely girls are in it.” The novel also contains Wilder’s signature ruminations on what really matters about life, love and work.

THEMES AND TOPICS FOR EXPLORATION LITERARY ELEMENTS FOR EXAMINATION Comparison with the adventures of the young man in The use of the first person narrator; the of the Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala; Wilder’s observation in Nine Ambitions and the Nine Cities of Newport; the autobio- an unpublished preface (included in the Afterword): “What graphical elements of the novel. does a man do with his despair, his rage, his frustration? There is a wide variety of things he does with it. One or the other of them is pictured in each of the chapters of this book. . . .”

“ In my early twenties I had fancied myself as an archaeologist. Here was a field [the Ninth City] for excavation. Dr. Schliemann had possessed a large fortune; I had not a dollar to spare. I reminded myself of an old saying I had read somewhere: ‘To the impassioned will nothing is impossible.’”—Theophilus in Theophilus North

12 About Thornton Wilder Born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Yale (B.A. 1920) and Princeton (M.A. 1925), Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). Wilder’s The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly!, and he also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, opera and film. His screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s (1943) remains a classic psycho- thriller to this day. The genius of Thornton Wilder continues to resonate. In Caricature of Thornton Wilder by Eva Herrmann, 1929. © 2006 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 1998 The Bridge of San Luis Rey was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century, and the closing lines of this work were quoted by British Prime Minister during the memo- rial service for victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001. In 2006, Our Town, performed at least once each day somewhere in this country, received its world premiere as an opera. Wilder’s many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee’s Medal for Literature. On April 17, 1997 Wilder was honored by the United States Postal Service with a 32-cent stamp issued in Hamden, Connecticut, his home after 1930. He died there on December 7, 1975. For more information about Thornton Wilder, please visit The Thornton Wilder Society at www.tcnj.edu/~wilder/

About Tappan Wilder Tappan Wilder is Thornton Wilder’s nephew and has served as the literary executor and manager of his uncle’s property since 1995. He plays a similar role for the literary legacies of Thornton Wilder’s three sisters and brother, all of whom were also writers. Wilder, who speaks widely about his uncle’s life and work, is proud to serve as Honorary Chair of the Thornton Wilder Society. A graduate of Yale College, he holds a Master of Arts degree in American history from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and a Master of Philosophy degree in American Studies from Yale. Before moving to the Washington, D.C. area in 1979 to help establish Partners for Livable Communities, he held a number of administrative positions at Yale. He is married to the historian Robin Gibbs Wilder, and they are the parents of two children.

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Complimentary desk copies are available for instructors who Not all books published by HarperCollins in the United States are adopt a HarperCollins or Hyperion title for course use as a available from HarperCollins in Australia, New Zealand, and the required text. One desk copy is available for every 15 copies of United Kingdom. Therefore, please check to make certain that each title ordered with a limit of 10 desk copies per adoption. HarperCollins is the publisher in your country. A copy of a bookstore or wholesaler order must be provided If you are an instructor teaching in Australia, New Zealand, or upon request as proof of adoption. the United Kingdom, contact the appropriate HarperCollins company: http://files.harpercollins.com/OMM/desk_copy_form.pdf To order a desk copy, please click here to request a desk HarperCollins Australia copy. You may also visit www.HarperAcademic.com to HarperCollins New Zealand request a desk copy. HarperCollins United Kingdom

E XAMINATION COPY O RDE R S Other Regions United States Only Not all books published by HarperCollins in the United States Examination copies are provided for instructors who are are available from HarperCollins in other parts of the world. considering a HarperCollins or Hyperion title for their course. Therefore, please check to make certain that HarperCollins is Paperback examination copies may be purchased with a 50% the publisher in your country. discount—plus sales tax. There is a limit of four titles per To request a desk or examination copy, professors should instructor per year. Hardcover examination copies are available contact [email protected]. at a 20% discount, plus $4.00 postage and handling per order. Examination charges are non-refundable. C USTOME R S E R VIC E : 1-800-331-3761 Examination charges must be prepaid with a credit card, check, Desk copy requests and examination copy orders may be called in or money order. The 50% discount paperback examination copy between 8:30 am to 4:30 pm EST. For examination copy requests, and 20% discounted hardcover examination copy offers are only please have your credit card ready. valid in the United States.

http://www.harpercollins.com/footer/deskCopy.aspx#examcopyreqTo order an examination copy, please click here to T HE A C A D EMIC M A R KETING DEPA R TMENT request an examination copy. You may also visit www. Visit www.HarperAcademic.com to request desk copies, download HarperAcademic.com to request an examination copy. an examination copy form, search our list, access instructor’s guides, sign up for our subject area e-bulletins, and view our Canada Only academic conference schedule. Not all books published by HarperCollins in the United States are available from HarperCollins Canada. Please check to make Y OU C AN R EAC H US AT A C A D EMIC @ H A R PER C OLLINS. C OM. certain that HarperCollins Canada is the publisher in Canada. Diane Burrowes Doreen Davidson Lauren Branchini To request a desk copy or examination copy online, visit Director Associate Director Assistant HarperCollins Canada.

By phone, please call 800-387-0117 Cont’d. next page By fax, please use 800-668-5788 By mail, please use the following address: HarperCollins Canada, Ltd. 1995 Markham Road Scarborough, Ontario M1B 5M8 Canada

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H A R PER C OLLINS S PEAKE R S B U R EAU

The HarperCollins SpeakersBureau is your connection to a stellar list of speakers for your campus events. The HarperCollins SpeakersBureau has access to all HarperCollins authors. If you are interested in Tappan Wilder as a speaker—or any HarperCollins author—please contact us, and we will be happy to locate the speaker of your choice, as well as negotiate and broker the engagement on your behalf. www.HarperCollinsSpeakers.com phone: 212-207-7100 fax: 212-207-7921

Jamie Brickhouse Julie Elmuccio Director Associate [email protected] [email protected]

B ULK S ALES

We know there are times when you would like to share a special book with your colleagues and students. For information on multiply-copy orders, please contact our Special Markets Department at 212-207-7945 or send an e-mail to [email protected].

P E R MISSIONS

If you wish to obtain the necessary permission for photocopying or creating course packets, please contact: Copyright Clearance Center • www.copyright.com • phone: 978-750-8400 • fax: 978-646-8600.

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