About Thornton Wilder and Our Town
About Thornton Wilder
and Our Town
“I am writing the most beautiful little play you can imagine. Every morning brings an hour’s increment to it and that’s all. But I’ve finished two acts already. It’s a little play with all the big subjects in it and it’s a big play with all the little things of life lovingly impressed into it.”
Wilder regarded “Our Town” as “an attempt to find value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.”
The play presents, he wrote, “the life of a village against the life of the stars.” Wilder’s dedicated theme as a dramatist was the essential dignity of the human spirit, cast against a deep sense of Time.
EVERY DAY at least Once a Day, somewhere in the world, a production of Our Town is happening!
The play has been translated into 30 languages.
(Read his full bio here)
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Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both drama (Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth) and fiction (The Bridge of San Luis Rey).
He collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt, hiked the Alps with the heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, received a bronze star for his service in World War II, and was credited with discovering Orson Welles.
He was also a much-loved teacher, letter-writer (especially with Gertrude Stein), and public speaker – in four languages.
Hello, Dolly! is based on his play The Matchmaker.
Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Yale and Princeton, was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works explore the connection between the commonplace and the cosmic dimensions of human experience. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of his seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and his next-to-last novel, The Eighth Day, received the National Book Award (1968). Two of his four major plays garnered Pulitzer Prizes: Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). His play The Matchmaker ran on Broadway for 486 performances (1955-1957), Mr. Wilder’s Broadway record, and was later adapted into the record-breaking musical Hello, Dolly!
Mr. Wilder also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them translation, acting, opera librettos, lecturing, teaching and film (his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 psycho-thriller Shadow of a Doubt remains a classic to this day). Letter writing held a central place in Mr. Wilder’s life, and since his death, three volumes of his letters have been published.
Mr. 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, the centenary of his birth, the US Postal Service unveiled the Thornton Wilder 32-cent stamp in Hamden, Connecticut, his official address after 1930 and where he died on December 7, 1975.
Mr. Wilder continues to be read and performed around the world. Our Town is performed at least once each day somewhere in this country, with his other major dramas and shorter plays not far behind. In 2008, Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey were selected as a joint choice for the NEA’s “Big Read” Program. In recent years Wilder’s works have also inspired a growing number of adaptations, among them an opera based on Our Town (music by Ned Rorem, libretto by J.D. McClatchy) and a dramatized version of his novel Theophilus North (Matt Burnett). Reflecting the renewed interest in Mr. Wilder, the Thornton Wilder Society sponsored the first international conference on his works in fall 2008. For more information, visit www.thorntonwilder.com.
Our Town is a pulitzer-prize and Tony Award Winning Drama.
It was ground-breaking in its time and continues to move and suprise audiences nearly 100 years later.
“One of the sagest, warmest and most deeply human scripts to have come out of our theatre.” – New York Post
“While all of Wilder's work is intelligent, non-synthetic and often moving, as well as funny, it is Our Town that makes the difference. It is probably the finest play ever written by an American.” – Edward Albee
“Thornton Wilder's masterpiece... An immortal tale of small town morality... a classic of soft spoken theater.” – The New York Times
“No American play describes more powerfully how we imagine ourselves.” – New York Daily News
“No play ever moved me so deeply.” – Alexander Woolcott, The New Yorker
“Our Town is titanic: beyond time and brutal… The ‘our’ in the title means everyone.” – The New York Times