1938: Our Town © 1938 Wilder Family LLC
1939: The Merchant of Yonkers © 1939 Wilder Family LLC
1942: The Skin of Our Teeth © 1942 Wilder Family LLC
1955: The Matchmaker © 1955 Wilder Family LLC
1955: The Alcestiad, with a Satyr Play, The Drunken Sisters © 1977 Yale University, Fisk University, and Oberlin College
1959: The Wreck on the 5:25 © 1959 Yale University, Fisk University, and Oberlin College
1960: Infancy [Childhood] © 1960 Yale University, Fisk University, and Oberlin College
Wilder’s selected nonfiction was published posthumously in Donald A. Gallup, ed., American Characteristics and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). © 1979 Wilder Family LLC.
Selected entries from Wilder’s journals are published in Donald A. Gallup, ed., The Journals of Thornton Wilder 1939–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). © 1985 Wilder Family LLC.
TNW’s surviving early journals (from 1912, 1916–17, and 1922–33) are unpublished, and while the entries in these journals are usually dated, they are not numbered until October 11, 1926. There are a few 1969 journal entries, also unpublished. Quoted or cited journal entries in the later years follow Gallup’s designations: “The 1939–1941 Journal” and “The 1948–1961 Journal,” but many of these entries are not included in the published volume.
Wilder’s selected letters appear in the following editions:
Edward M. Burns with Joshua A. Gaylord, eds., A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001).
Ulla Dydo and Edward M. Burns, with William Rice, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Copyright © 2008 Wilder Family LLC. (Compilation of the letters and added text copyright © Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, eds.)
Previous full-length biographies of Wilder include:
Richard H. Goldstone, Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).
Gilbert Harrison, The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1983).
Linda Simon, Thornton Wilder: His World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).
Book-length Wilder bibliographies include:
Richard H. Goldstone and Gary Anderson, Thornton Wilder: An Annotated Bibliography of Works by and About Thornton Wilder (New York: AMS Press, 1982).
Claudette Walsh, Thornton Wilder: A Reference Guide, 1926–1990 (New York: G.K. Hall, 1993).
Many of the papers of Amos Niven Wilder, Charlotte Wilder, Isabel Wilder, and Janet Wilder Dakin are deposited with the Thornton Niven Wilder Collection at Yale. As of this writing, however, mystery surrounds the fate of some of Charlotte’s papers. In the year after Thornton’s death, it fell to Isabel to deal with twenty years’ accrual of Charlotte’s papers in the “dust-covered, untidy, hastily packed cartons” stored in the attic of the house on Deepwood Drive. As Isabel wrestled with the boxes in the attic, pages fell out. Notebooks opened. In glancing at the pages, Isabel wrote, she came across “startling words,” painful words. There were, she estimated, hundreds if not thousands of pages of prose—fiction and nonfiction—most likely Charlotte’s unfinished memoir and her autobiographical novel. Letters over the next few years trace the movement of Charlotte’s manuscripts from Isabel to Amos to Janet and back again. The manuscripts themselves have not been found. No records have been uncovered to document their ultimate disposition, nor can family memories shed light, and the search continues. Among Charlotte’s surviving papers, however, are many pages with poems typed on one side and fragments of prose on the reverse, as sadly incomplete and incoherent as Charlotte’s life itself.
THE THREE earlier biographies listed above were written without access to all of the resources now housed at the Beinecke Library or in other collections, public and private. Now that Thornton Wilder’s papers are more fully available, rich opportunities for research await students and scholars who are interested in American literary, theater, cultural, and social history in general, or in Wilder’s plays, novels, lectures, essays, translations, adaptations, and/or journals in particular.
For further exploration of Wilder resources, readers are invited to consult the following Wilder-related Web sites:
www.library.yale.edu/beinecke
www.PenelopeNiven.com
www.ThorntonWilder.com
www.ThorntonWilderSociety.org
Key to Abbreviations Used in the Notes
TNW
Thornton Niven Wilder
ANW
Amos Niven Wilder, TNW’s brother
APW
Amos Parker Wilder, TNW’s father
AWC
Alexander Woollcott Collection
HLH
Houghton Library, Harvard University
LB
TNW’s Letter Book
LC
Library of Congress
LD
TNW’s Letter Diary
NARA
National Archive and Records Administration, Washington, DC
PEN
Penelope Ellen Niven
SL
Robin G. Wilder & Jackson R. Bryer, eds., The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. This designation in the notes indicates that a quoted or cited letter is published in this edition of Wilder’s letters.
TS
Typescript
YCAL
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (TNW Collection, YCAL designates papers of TNW, ANW, APW, and other members of the Wilder family; YCAL alone designates papers held in other collections in the Yale Collection of American Literature in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
NOTES
PREFACE: “THE HISTORY OF A WRITER”
1. TNW, unpublished semiautobiographical fragment, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.
2. TNW, “On Reading the Great Letter Writers,” in Donald Gallup, ed., American Characteristics and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 152. This was titled “English Letters and Letter Writers” when it was delivered by TNW on May 4, 1928, as the Daniel S. Lamont Memorial Lecture at Yale University.
3. TNW, unpublished lecture/essay on biography, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.
4. TNW, “On Reading the Great Letter Writers,” 153.
1: “GODLY FOLK” (1862–1906)
1. The address of TNW’s birthplace differs in various accounts. The Madison City Directory for 1896–97 gives the address as 14 West Gilman Street. The 1898–99 directory gives a Mendota Court address for the Wilders. The 1900–1901 directory lists the Wilders’ address as 211 West Gilman, a duplex apartment they kept until about 1912.
2. TNW, “On Reading the Great Letter Writers,” 158.
3. Isabel Wilder, “Thornton Wilder: The Anchor of Midwestern Beginnings,” Wisconsin Academy Review 26, no. 3 (1980), 8.
4. Amos Parker Wilder, “Sketch Written by Himself for His Children,” History of Dane County, Biographical and Genealogical (Madison, WI: Western Historical Association, 1906), 960.
5. Historic Madison: A Journal of the Four Lake Region 12 (1995).
6. APW, “Sketch written by himself for his children,” 957.
7. There were Baptist congregations, often much persecuted, in Massachusetts as early as 1638, and in Maine as early as 1681. See Joshua Millet, A History of Baptists in Maine (Portland: C. Day, 1845), 24.
8. “Merry and Some Others: A Family Chronicle,” Wilder Family Papers, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged microfilm.
9. APW, “Sketch written by himself for his children,” 957. Calais, Maine, in the St. Croix Valley, stands just across the St. Croix River from St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada.
10. APW Papers, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
1
1. Munsey later went on to found a publishing empire inspired by the mail-order-magazine business in Augusta, which, from 1869 until 1942, was known as the mail-order-magazine capital of the United States.
12. APW to ANW, August 21, 1916, ANW, Wilder Family Record, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged papers.
13. APW, “Sketch written by himself for his children,” 958.
14. ANW, 1939, ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
15. Isabel Wilder Interview, [1981?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged tape recording and transcription.
16. Some published accounts indicate that the Reverend Thornton M. Niven was a founder of the school. While he helped the Misses Masters secure the lease on the Dobbs Ferry building that housed the school for its first six years, he was not, so far as is known, a founder of the school, according to Renée Bennett, Director of Communications, Masters School, Renée Bennett to PEN, September 15, 2010.
17. Isabel Wilder Interview, [1981?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged tape recording and transcription.
18. Quoted in Arthur Channing Downs, Jr., The Architecture and Life of the Hon. Thornton MacNess Niven (1806–1895) (Goshen, NY: Orange County Community of Museums & Galleries, 1971), 55.
19. Richard F. Snow, “The Most Beautiful Dry Dock,” American Heritage 6, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1990): 4.
20. The seminary was located in Hampden-Sydney, Virginia, before it was moved to Richmond in 1898.
21. Downs, The Architecture and Life of the Hon. Thornton MacNess Niven, 13. See also “Bibles with Family Genealogies,” “Family Connections,” ANW, Wilder Family Record, June 4, 1987. Information about Thornton MacNess Niven’s theological training and ordination is recorded in “Tribute to Dr. T. M. Niven,” New York Observer, February 20, 1908.
22. Charlotte Tappan Niven wrote to her niece, Charlotte Elizabeth Wilder, on August 18, 1969, “My elder brother was the last Archibald Campbell N. He died of TB in Pasadena, Calif. at age of 20 in 1891.” TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
23. In 1887–88 Robert Louis Stevenson had spent several months in treatment there, and composed The Master of Ballantrae during his residency.
24. Archibald Campbell Niven to his family, May 15, 1891, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
25. “Amos Wilder, Editor, Hong Kong Consul, Dies,” Wisconsin State Journal, July 2, 1936.
26. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery, (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 100, 127–31.
27. Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1871), 241.
28. For background on the Tappan brothers, see Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery, 1–16, 41–59, 98–125, 126–48, 185–204, 226–47, 310–27, 328–46.
29. Isabel Wilder to ANW, March 1, 1970, ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
30. A handwritten note among the uncataloged Thornton Wilder Family papers, TNW Collection, YCAL, refers to this oration and indicates that it “may be related to the Columbian Exposition.”
31. “Club News and Gossip,” New York Times, March 6, 1892, 19.
32. Caroline W. Olyphant to Isabella Niven Wilder, May 2, 189[3 or 4?], Isabella Niven Wilder’s “Commonplace Book,” TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged album.
33. Isabel Wilder to ANW, March 1, 1970, ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
34. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, May 18, 1917, ANW, Wilder Family Record. The marriage certificate indicates that the Wilders were married in the Presbyterian Manse rather than in the church. Private Collection.
35. Ibid.
36. APW, “Sketch written by himself for his children,” 958.
37. APW to Amos Lincoln Wilder, December 6, 1880, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
38. APW to Amos Lincoln Wilder, March 29, 1883, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
39. APW, “Sketch written by himself for his children,” 959.
40. Ibid.
41. Edward S. Jordan, “Madison of Yesteryear Had Its Debates . . . and Horseplay, Too,” Wisconsin State Journal, August 21, 1949.
42. Isabel Wilder to ANW, March 1, 1970, ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
43. ANW, April 1932, ANW, Wilder Family Record. In the official affidavit certifying ANW’s birth, APW indicated that Margaret Donoghue was the nurse present at his birth on September 18, 1895. ANW’s wife, Catharine Kerlin Wilder, wrote that Nurse Donoghue assisted in the births of all five of the Wilder children; the first four were born in Madison, Wisconsin, and Nurse Donoghue was “summoned” from Wisconsin to Berkeley, California, for the birth of the fifth. See Catharine Kerlin Wilder, Milestones in My Life (Family Publication, 2000), 21.
44. Isabel Wilder Interview, July 6, 1981, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged transcription.
45. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, June 7, 1917, ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
46. Jordan, “Madison of Yesteryear Had Its Debates . . . and Horseplay, Too.”
47. “Even La Follette Men See Errors. Madison Journal Advises La Follette’s Overthrow If He Hinder’s [sic] Spooner’s Re-Election,” Janesville (Wisconsin) Daily Gazette, June 20, 1902.
48. Ibid.
49. “Wilder on Suffrage,” Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Daily Northwestern, September 27, 1902. The text was submitted by mail to the Northwestern on September 24, 1902, from Dunkirk, New York, where Wilder made an address on the subject.
50. The church was founded in 1840, and in 1873 ground was broken for a new building with a sanctuary capable of seating fifteen hundred people. First Congregational Church Register, vol. 2, “Communicants and Baptisms,” 141. Courtesy of John B. Toussaint.
51. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, May 24, 1917, ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
52. The Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the First Congregational Church of Madison, Wisconsin 1840–1915 and the Quarter Centennial of Eugene Grover Updike, 33. Also see then-current church membership roster and index in the above publication, 115.
53. Mrs. E. B. Stensland to APW, October 1, 1933, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
54. Isabel Wilder, “Thornton Wilder: The Anchor of Midwestern Beginnings,” 8.
55. Ibid., 9.
56. Isabel Wilder, foreword to The Alcestiad or A Life in the Sun (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1980), 7.
57. ANW, “Practice: A Road the Layperson Can Travel to the Domain of the Arts,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 8, no. 3 (February/March 1978): 2.
58. APW to “My dear Children,” June 12, 1910, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
59. TNW to Richard H. Goldstone, “The Art of Fiction XVI,” in Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Thornton Wilder (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992), 69–70.
2: “A FORETASTE OF HEAVEN” (1906–1909)
1. ANW, Thornton Wilder and His Public (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 62.
2. “Motto of New York. Wisconsin Man’s Comment After Riding City’s Cars.” New York Times, April 29, 1905.
3. “Badger Editor Speaks: Amos P. Wilder Will Address Young Men of Racine,” Racine (Wisconsin) Daily Journal, February 10, 1906.
4. William Howard Taft to APW, April 14, 1905, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged papers; Janesville (Wisconsin) Daily Gazette, June 27, 1905.
5. “Badger Editor Speaks: Amos P. Wilder Will Address Young Men of Racine.”
6. “La Follette and Wilder,” reprinted from New York World in Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Daily Northwestern, March 2, 1906.
7. ANW, Thornton Wilder and His Public, 62. Research information provided on February 27, 2008, by Katherine Mollan of the Center for Legislative Archives, NARA, indicates that Sen. Robert La Follette objected to Wilder’s appointment “on the grounds that Wilder was personally offensive to him.” Other than that record, no documents have yet been located to describe a confirmation hearing for APW. Ms. Mollan observes, “It is qu
ite possible that Wilder never testified. Confirmation hearings were still relatively uncommon in the beginning of the 20th century.”
8. APW to his mother, May 14, [1906?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Details of the voyage and of life in China are drawn primarily from APW’s letters and diary entries of the period, largely contained in the TNW Collection, YCAL, especially the uncataloged papers. In addition there are accounts by Isabella Niven Wilder, TNW, and ANW. There are, furthermore, accounts by Isabel Wilder, published in her foreword to Donald Gallup, ed., The Journals of Thornton Wilder 1939–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), and other sources, as indicated in the notes, and recollections given in interviews she recorded in the 1980s (TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged papers). Isabel Wilder was six years old at the time of the move to China, and some of her memories and interpretations, expressed when she was in her eighties, do not coincide with the letters, diaries, and other documents generated during the China sojourn. Here and throughout this biography, when Isabel Wilder seems to be a reliable eyewitness to events, I have relied on her accounts. When she seems to be reporting events or interpretations by hearsay, I have not relied on her accounts unless they can be verified by other sources. Likewise I have noted in the narrative text the semiautobiographical nature of TNW’s own writings on China, and have incorporated details from those writings into the narrative as fact only when the facts could be corroborated by other sources, especially letters, diaries, and other documents of the period in question.
12. Isabel Wilder, foreword to Gallup, The Journals of Thornton Wilder 1939–1961, viii–ix.
13. APW to his mother, May 18, 1906, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
14. APW to his mother, May 14, [1906?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
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