LSU School of Theatre presents: Our Town

Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition is the first reading of Wilder's life, fiction, drama, and criticism as a product of American culture. Early American studies by Sacvan Bercovitch, Mason Lowance Jr., Emory Elliott, and others have identified aspects of the American literary tradition stemming from New England Puritan writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lincoln Konkle extends the argument for continuity into both the twentieth century and the profane space of the theater.

Briefly traces the life of the Pulitzer Prize winning author, discusses his major novels and plays, and examines his approach to structure and pacing.

A biographical study of Wilder's career with an interpretation and assessment of his literary accomplishments.

Thornton Wilder, three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, remains to many people an enigma. Malcolm Cowley indicated that "in point of intelligent criticism, Wilder is the most neglected author of a brilliant generation" and the Times Literary Supplement once observed that "Thornton Wilder has successfully resisted any kind of classification as a novelist or playwright" In this revealing, incisive study, Amos Wilder, Thornton's older brother, seeks to situate his brother's vision and art. Much criticism, dominated my modernist canons, has not known what to do with Thornton Wilder and finds suspect his wide popularity and what is seen as his traditionalist or "mid-brow" outlook informed by "Puritan" antecedents and rearing. The present essay, however, documents Wilder's full initiation into the "modern" experience, only insisting that he absorbed its iconoclasms into a deeper and more universal humanism. Critical circles, in their view of the American Writer in our day, commonly neglect and disparage those legacies, cultural and religious, which shaped Wilder's outlook. Therefore, the central section of this essay is devoted to biographical detail, illustrating those creative factors and faiths that undergird American society and its promise. Many readers will be aided in their understanding of Wilder by this book's description of the special circumstances of his education, formative influences, and family life. Thornton Wilder and His Public offers rare, intimately informed, and helpful illumination on the life and art of one of America's greatest literary figures.

Known today primarily as the author of Our Town, probably America's most beloved and widely produced play, Thornton Wilder is the only writer ever to be honored with Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama. This collection of interviews with Wilder covers the full range of his sixty-year career as one of America's leading men of letters. In addition to American interviews, this book includes translations of interviews published originally in French and German that have never appeared in English previously. It includes a transcription of a rare radio interview conducted by Rex Stout and an extensive Paris Review conversation between Wilder and Richard H. Goldston, his first biographer.