79. APW to Isabella Niven Wilder, December 1916, ANW, Wilder Family Record, TNW Collection, YCAL.
9: DISTANT SONS (1917)
1. TNW to Mother, October 22, [19]16, TNW Collection, YCAL.
2. TNW to Family, Monday Night, [1916 or 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
3. TNW to Papa, January 11, [19]17, TNW Collection, YCAL.
4. TNW to Papa, February 14, [19]17, TNW Collection, YCAL.
5. Ibid.
6. TNW to Sherman Thacher, March 4, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
7. Ibid.
8. APW to TNW, March 18, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
9. Ibid.
10. TNW to Mother, March 14 [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL. TNW’s pleas to do wartime farmwork may be found in his two postcards to his father, April 21, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
11. TNW refers to the three spiritual stories in TNW to Papa, “Second Sunday in March,” [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
12. Ibid.
13. TNW to Papa, “The First Day of Spring / The Third Year of the War,” [March 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
14. Ibid.
15. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, March 15, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
16. ANW, Armageddon Revisited, 9.
17. TNW to Family, [April 6, 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
18. TNW to APW, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
19. TNW to Family, “The day War was declared / Good Friday . . . ,”[April 6, 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
20. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, April 13, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
21. TNW to APW, Isabella Niven Wilder, Isabel, and Janet, April 10, [19]17, TNW Collection, YCAL.
22. TNW to ANW, April 11, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
23. TNW to Elizabeth Lewis Niven, April 19, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
24. TNW to Mother, April 20, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
25. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, April 27, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL uncataloged letters.
26. TNW to Family, April 22, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
27. TNW to Family, Monday Night, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.
28. TNW to Family, April 22, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
29. TNW to Mother, [Fall 1916?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
30. TNW to Family, April 22, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
31. TNW to Papa, April 21, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
32. TNW to APW, May 1, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
33. TNW to Family, April 10, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
34. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” April 25, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
35. TNW to APW, Monday Morning, [June 4, 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
36. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” April 25, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
37. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” May 14, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL. After a long career in theater and motion pictures, Gareth Hughes became Brother David in the early 1940s, and in 1944 began working with the Paiute Indians in Nevada (not as a priest, but as a layperson). He died at the age of seventy on October 1, 1965, at the Motion Picture House and Country Home, Woodland Hills, California, according to his official biographer, Stephen Lyons.
38. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” May 17, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” April 29, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
42. APW to TNW, April 30, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
43. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” April 28, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
44. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” April 30, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
45. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” May 3, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
46. TNW to Papa, May 10, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
47. Ibid.
48. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, May 10, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
49. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, May 18, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
50. TNW to ANW, May 26, [19]17, TNW Collection, YCAL.
51. TNW to Papa, [May 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
52. Ibid.
53. TNW to Papa, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
54. TNW to Papa, [May 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
55. TNW, “Journal. Commencing April 25, 1917,” May 26, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
56. TNW to ANW, May 26, [19]17, TNW Collection, YCAL.
57. Ibid.
58. ANW, Thornton Wilder and His Public, 10.
59. TNW to ANW, May 26, [19]17, TNW Collection, YCAL.
10: “FLOWERING INTO LITERATURE” (1917–1918)
1. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, March 1, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
2. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, May 31, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
3. TNW to ANW, October 18, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
4. TNW, The Eighth Day (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), 10.
5. TNW to Papa & Family, June 13, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
6. APW to “My Darling Son,” [June 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
7. Ibid.
8. APW to TNW, June 30, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
9. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, June 28, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
10. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, July 5, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
11. Charlotte Wilder, “Hollows,” 1918–19, LD 7096.6 1919, courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. Robert Frost’s message was conveyed in a letter from Clara F. Stevens to Charlotte, June 6, 1919, also courtesy of Mount Holyoke.
12. APW to ANW, June 30, [1914?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
13. Ibid.
14. APW to TNW, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL. (One page of typed letter is missing.)
15. TNW to ANW, August 1, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
16. TNW to Mother, July 26, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
17. TNW to Papa & Family, June 13, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
18. TNW to Mother, July 26, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
19. TNW to Mother, July 20, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
20. Ibid.
21. TNW to Mother, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
22. Charles Wager to TNW, June 26, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
23. TNW to Charles Wager, [June 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
24. APW to TNW, June 30, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
25. Quoted in Shannon H. Wilson, Berea College: An Illustrated History (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), synopsis.
26. TNW to APW, [Summer 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
27. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, January 18, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL uncataloged letters.
28. TNW to ANW, August 1, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL.
29. TNW to Charles Wager, September 2, [1917?], Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, OH.
30. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, August 9, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
31. TNW to Papa, n.d. [August 1917], TNW Collection, YCAL.
32. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, August 9, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
33. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, September 7, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
34. TNW to ANW, September 7, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
35. Ibid.
36. TNW to Charles Wager, September 25, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
37. TNW to ANW, September 13, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
38. TNW to Charles Wager, September [1917?], SL, 113–14.
39. Leonard M. Daggett, ed., The Record of the Class of Eighty-Four, Yale College, 1914�
�1936 (New Haven, 1936), 187.
40. Isabel Wilder to ANW, September 7, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
41. APW to ANW, September 12, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
42. TNW to ANW, October 18, 1917, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
43. Ibid.
44. TNW to Charles Wager, October 16, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
45. Ibid.
46. Wilmarth “Lefty” Lewis, “Thornton Wilder,” unpublished typescript. TNW Collection, YCAL.
47. Morehead Patterson, ed., History of the Class of Nineteen Hundred Twenty (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, 1920), 433.
48. TNW to Charles Wager, October 4, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. TNW to Charles Wager, October 16, [1917], TNW Collection, YCAL. Lingering questions about conventional versus unconventional religious faith and practice emerge from the compressed intensity of this playlet.
52. TNW’s published playlets included The Message and Jehanne in November 1917; The Walled City (later revised, renamed, and published as Nascuntur Poetae . . .) and That Other Fanny Otcott in April 1918; The Penny That Beauty Spent in March 1919; Not for Leviathan in April 1919; and Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came in June 1919. He reviewed W. B. Yeats’s “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” in the March 1918 issue.
53. TNW, “Measure for Measure,” [1917?], manuscript, TNW Collection, YCAL. TNW’s sonnet, worked on in his spare time for a week at Berea, reads in part:
Then Love in dark aspect Lord Shakespeare brings,
Now in the highest reason of his Thought;
And shows all Beauty trembling as she sings,
And all the ruin that the God hath wrought.
Wherefore to give this dire conception tongue
An Eros-ridden world moves to his call
The agéd villainous and the piteous young;
And see! That chain, or wreath, is worn by all.
54. Charles A. Wager to TNW, January 15, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
55. The Book of the Yale Elizabethan Club (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913), 43.
56. TNW to Charles Wager, “Dialogue in the Elizabethan Club,” [December 11, 1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
57. Isabella Niven Wilder to ANW, January 17, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL uncataloged letters.
58. TNW, “The Walled City,” holograph manuscript, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.
59. APW to ANW, September 12, [1917?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
60. TNW, Nascuntur Poetae . . . , in The Angel That Troubled the Waters, 9–12.
11: “HEROES” (1918)
1. TNW to ANW, May 27, 1917, ANW, Wilder Family Record, TNW Collection, YCAL.
2. TNW to Theodore Wilder, February, [19]18, TNW Collection, YCAL.
3. Charles Wager to TNW, January 15, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
4. TNW to Charles Wager, January [day illegible], [19]18, TNW Collection, YCAL.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. TNW quoting the letter from Gareth Hughes, in TNW to Charles Wager, January [day illegible], [19]18, TNW Collection, YCAL.
11. TNW to Theodore Wilder, February [19]18, TNW Collection, YCAL.
12. TNW to Charles Wager, January [day illegible], [19]18, TNW Collection, YCAL.
13. ANW, Armageddon Revisited, 57.
14. “7,873 Yale Men in War,” New York Times, March 9, 1919.
15. The John Hubbard Curtis Prize was endowed by Mrs. Virginia Curtis in memory of her son, John, (Yale 1887), who had committed suicide. At her request Professor William Lyon Phelps was one of the permanent members of the prize committee.
16. TNW, “Spiritus Valet,” John Hubbard Curtis Prize story, Yale Courant, May 1918, 230, 232–34, 246, 251.
17. Ibid.
18. TNW to ANW, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
19. Ibid.
20. “7,873 Yale Men in War.”
21. Andrew Mangino, “Yalies in the Military,” New York Times, December 1, 2006.
22. Walter Millis, “The War,” in Patterson, History of the Class of Nineteen Hundred Twenty, 63–76.
23. Tappan Wilder to PEN, July 2008.
24. “7,873 Yale Men in War.”
25. Millis, “The War,” 63–76.
26. Stephen Vincent Benét to John Farrar, December 14, 1918, in Charles A. Fenton, ed., Selected Letters of Stephen Vincent Benét (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 19.
27. Charles A. Fenton, Stephen Vincent Benét: The Life and Times of an American Man of Letters 1898–1943 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 73.
28. Stephen Vincent Benét to John Farrar, December 14, 1918, in Fenton, Selected Letters of Stephen Vincent Benét, 19.
29. APW to ANW, May 25, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL uncataloged letters.
30. TNW to Bruce T. Simonds, July 19, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid. Vecy-Segal, a comedy, was not completed but survives in typescript in the TNW Collection, YCAL. A segment of it, “Sea Chanty: ‘Vecy-Segal,’ Scene IV,” appeared in December 1919 in S4N, a journal published by TNW’s Yale friend Norman Fitts, class of 1919.
33. TNW to Papa, June 29, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
34. TNW to Papa, [Summer 1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
35. TNW, Centaurs, in The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, 40–43. As shall be seen, this playlet was first published in S4N in April 1920, as The Death of the Centaur: A Footnote to Ibsen.
36. TNW to Mother, [Summer 1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL. Holograph notes, a typescript, and a carbon typescript of The Breaking of Exile are among TNW’s papers in the TNW Collection, YCAL.
37. TNW to Mother, August 9, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
38. “Almost boisterously”: TNW to Papa, June 29, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL. “More genial and approachable”: TNW to Papa, [Summer 1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
39. APW to ANW, September 7, 1918, ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
40. APW to ANW, June 14, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
41. APW to ANW, July 3, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
42. ANW, Armageddon Revisited, 110.
43. ANW to TNW, July 14, [1918?] TNW Collection, YCAL.
44. APW to TNW, July 5, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
45. Ibid.
46. TNW to “Pops,” August 14, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
47. Ibid.
48. APW to ANW, August 29, [1918?], and September 21, [1918?], ANW, Wilder Family Record, TNW Collection, YCAL.
49. ANW, Armageddon Revisited, 125.
50. Ibid., 126–50.
51. Ibid., 128–29.
52. Ibid., 129.
53. Ibid., 138–39.
54. The Panthéon tribute to Guynemer read in part, “A legendary hero, fallen from the very zenith of victory after three years’ hard and continuous fighting, he will be considered the most perfect embodiment of the national qualities for his indomitable energy and perseverance and his exalted gallantry.”
55. TNW, “Guynemer,” holograph manuscript, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.
56. TNW, “In Praise of Guynemer,” December 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL. Published in the Yale Literary Magazine 84, no. 1 (December 1918): 27–29.
57. TNW, “From a Dialogue ‘In Praise of Guynemer,’ ” in Patterson, History of the Class of Nineteen Hundred Twenty, 441.
58. APW to ANW, August 2, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.
59. APW to ANW, August 29 [1918?], ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
60. ANW to TNW, [June 1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
61. APW to TNW, July 5, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
62. APW to TNW, August 11, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
63. Trench mouth: Dr. Austin Temple
provided the information that trench mouth was so named because of the epidemic of severe gingivitis among the men in the trenches during World War I.
64. APW to TNW, August 11, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
65. TNW to Papa, August 1, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
66. TNW to Mother, [September 1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
67. TNW to Mother, October 16, [1918?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
68. Ibid. That fall Thornton helped set up a weekly newspaper at Fort Adams. He contributed a poem, which quickly became popular and was circulated widely. Arguably, it may have been the best verse he ever wrote:
Beans
The bean, the bean’s the only thing!
Lima, castor, jelly, string
In our porridge, in our hash,
Stirred up in our succotash;
Soldiers, sailors and marines
Live and die on army beans;
Officers must face them too,
Boiled or baked or in a stew.
In the pod or in the pot,
Red or green or cold or hot,
I’ll break away from this routine,
Desert the army—and the bean.
69. TNW to Mother, November 30, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
70. TNW to Mother, December 16, [19]18, TNW Collection, YCAL.
71. TNW to Papa, December 4, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
72. APW to ANW, November 29, [1918?], ANW, Wilder Family Record, Private Collection.
73. Ibid.
74. The George F. Kaufman–Marc Connelly script was a satire of Hollywood, featuring a very serious actor who was so seriously bad that he was funny. Studio executives let Merton believe he had gotten a very serious part in a tragic drama, but, unknown to him, they filmed it as a comedy. A remake of the film in 1947 starred the comedian Red Skelton.
75. Glenn Hunter to TNW, [postmarked December 8, 1918], TNW Collection, YCAL.
76. Glenn Hunter to TNW, December 23 and 26, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
77. Glenn Hunter to TNW, [postmarked December 8, 1918], TNW Collection, YCAL.
78. Glenn Hunter to TNW, December 12, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
79. Glenn Hunter to TNW, December 23 and 26, 1918, TNW Collection, YCAL.
80. History of Hamden Men in the World War from Information Collected and Compiled by the Hamden War Bureau (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, n.d.), ix–x.
12: “HIS OWN TUNE” (1919–1921)
1. TNW, “Student-Life at Yale Since the War,” [1919?] TNW Collection, YCAL.
Penelope Niven Page 84