Thornton Wilder

File:Thornton Wilder as a child at family vacation cabin Wisconsin 1900.jpg at the family cottage in Maple Bluff, Wisconsin in 1900]]

Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor{{cite news |last=Isherwood |first=Charles |title=A Life Captured With Luster Left Intact |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/books/thornton-wilder-a-life-by-penelope-niven.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y |access-date=November 1, 2012 |newspaper=The New York Times |date=October 31, 2012 |page=C1}} and later a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Thornton Niven.{{cite news |title=Mrs. Wilder Dies in East |url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/52686397/isabella-thornton-niven-wilder/ |newspaper=Wisconsin State Journal |date=July 3, 1946 |page=5 |via = Newspapers.com |access-date=June 3, 2020}} {{Open access}}

Wilder had four siblings as well as a twin who was stillborn.[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/07/man-of-letters-5 Man of Letters: The Case of Thornton Wilder] By Robert Gottlieb, December 31, 2012 Published in print in the column A Critic at Large in the January 7, 2013, issue of The New Yorker. Accessed online May 4, 2020. All of the surviving Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China when their father was stationed in Hong Kong and Shanghai as U.S. Consul General. Thornton's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, became Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. He was a noted poet{{citation needed|date=December 2024}} and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. Their sister Isabel Wilder was an accomplished writer. They had two more sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist.{{cite book |last=Niven |first=Penelope |title=Thornton Wilder: A Life |publisher=Harper |year=2012 |pages=92, 370}}

File:Thornton Wilder Yale graduation photo 1920.jpg graduation photo]]

Wilder began writing plays while at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual. According to a classmate, "We left him alone, just left him alone. And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference."{{Quote without source|date=December 2024}} His family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 1910. He attended the English China Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai, but returned with his mother and siblings to California in 1912 because of the unstable political conditions in China at the time.{{cite news |url=http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2008-12-18/article/31842?headline=Thornton-Wilder-on-the-South-Side-of-Our-Town |title=Thornton Wilder on the South Side of Our Town |newspaper=The Berkeley Daily Planet |first=Phil |last=McArdle |date=December 17, 2008}} Thornton graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915.{{Cite web|url=http://www.thorntonwilder.com/about-wilder/biography/|title=Biography|website=Thornton Wilder|language=en-US|access-date=January 10, 2018}}

Wilder served a three-month enlistment in the U.S. Army's Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams in Rhode Island during World War I, eventually rising to the rank of corporal. He attended Oberlin College before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920 at Yale University, where he refined his writing skills as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a literary society. He earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926.{{cite web |url=http://www.twildersociety.org/biography/chronology/ |title=Chronology |website=Thornton Wilder Society |access-date=July 14, 2017}}

File:Craven-Scott-Craven-Our-Town.jpg, Martha Scott, and John Craven in the original Broadway production of Our Town, published in 1938, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama]]

File:Thornton Wilder (1948).jpg

File:Thornton-Wilder-TIME-1953.jpg magazine]]

After graduating, Wilder went to Italy and studied archaeology and Italian (1920–21) as part of an eight-month residency at The American Academy in Rome, and then taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, beginning in 1921. His first novel, [https://www.thorntonwilder.com/the-cabala-and-the-woman-of-andros The Cabala], was published in 1926. In 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success and his first Pulitzer Prize (1928). He resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928. From 1930 to 1937, he taught at the University of Chicago, during which time he published his translation of André Obey's own adaptation of the tale "Le Viol de Lucrece" (1931) under the title "Lucrece" (Longmans Green, 1933).{{cite web |url=http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/reviews/05-2000/lucrece_714.html |title=Lucrece |first1=Barbara |last1=Siegel |first2=Scott |last2=Siegel |date=May 22, 2000 |work=TheaterMania.com}} In Chicago, he became famous as a lecturer and was chronicled on the celebrity pages.{{Cite news |last=Jones |first=Chris |url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-prj-1223-thornton-wilder-20121228-column.html |title=Our town was Wilder's town too |work=Chicago Tribune |access-date=February 13, 2020}} In 1938, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Our Town, and he won the prize again in 1943 for his play The Skin of Our Teeth.{{cite web |url=http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/218 |title=Drama – The Pulitzer Prizes |author= |date=2017 |website=Pulitzer |publisher=Columbia University |access-date=April 27, 2017 }}

World War II saw Wilder rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. He received several awards for his military service.The American Legion of Merit and Bronze Star, Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur from France, and an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from Britain. He went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor. Though he considered himself a teacher first and a writer second, he continued to write all his life, receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1957 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. In 1968 he won the National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.[https://www.thorntonwilder.com/the-eighth-day] The Wilder Family Website

Proficient in four languages,{{cite book |first=Donald |last=Margulies |title=Our Town – A Play in Three Acts |publisher=HarperPerennial |year=1998 |at=[https://archive.org/details/ourtownplayinthr00wild_1/page/ Foreword and "About The Author" by Margulies] |isbn=978-0-06-051263-7 |url=https://archive.org/details/ourtownplayinthr00wild_1/page/ }} Wilder translated plays by André Obey and Jean-Paul Sartre. He wrote the libretti of two operas, The Long Christmas Dinner, composed by Paul Hindemith, and The Alcestiad, composed by Louise Talma and based on his own play. Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired, asked him to write the screenplay of his thriller Shadow of a Doubt,{{Cite journal |last=Kornhaber |first=Donna |title=Hitchcock's Diegetic Imagination: Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt, and Hitchcock's Mise-en-Scène |journal=Clues: A Journal of Detection |volume=31 |issue=1|year=2013 |pages=67–78 |doi=10.3172/CLU.31.1.67 |doi-access=free }} and he completed a first draft for the film.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them. Philosophically, the book explores the question of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem "innocent" or "undeserving". It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and in 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. The book was quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001.{{cite news |title=Text of Tony Blair's reading in New York |place=London, UK |newspaper=The Guardian |date=September 21, 2001 |url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/21/september11.usa11 |access-date=June 3, 2009 |quote= "A witness to the deaths, wanting to make sense of them and explain the ways of God to his fellow human beings, examined the lives of the people who died, and these words were said by someone who knew the victims, and who had been through the many emotions, and the many stages, of bereavement and loss.

"But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning."}} Since then its popularity has grown enormously.{{fact|date=January 2021}} The book is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events before the disaster.{{Citation needed|date = April 2017}}

Wilder wrote Our Town, a popular play (and later film) set in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. It was inspired in part by Dante's PurgatorioBreyer, Jackson R. editor. Rojcewicz, Stephen. "Our Tears: Lacrimae Rerum and Thorton Wilder". Thornton Wilder in Collaboration: Collected Essays on His Drama and Fiction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, December 17, 2018. p. 166 {{ISBN|978-1-5275-2364-7}}.Erhard, Elise. "Searching for Our Town". Crisis Magazine. February 7, 2013. and in part by his friend Gertrude Stein's novel The Making of Americans.Konkle, Lincoln. Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition. University of Missouri Press (2006). pp. 7–10. {{ISBN|978-0-8262-6497-8}} Wilder suffered from writer's block while writing the final act. Our Town employs a choric narrator called the Stage Manager and a minimalist set to underscore the human experience. Wilder himself played the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in summer stock productions. Following the daily lives of the Gibbs and Webb families, as well as the other inhabitants of Grover's Corners, the play illustrates the importance of the universality of the simple, yet meaningful lives of all people in the world in order to demonstrate the value of appreciating life. The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize.

In 1938, Max Reinhardt directed a Broadway production of The Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder had adapted from Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842). It was a failure, closing after 39 performances.{{cite book |last=Niven |first=Penelope |title=Thornton Wilder: A Life |publisher=Harper |year=2012 |page=471}}

His play The Skin of Our Teeth opened in New York on November 18, 1942, featuring Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead. Again, the themes are familiar – the timeless human condition; history as progressive, cyclical, or entropic; literature, philosophy, and religion as the touchstones of civilization. Three acts dramatize the travails of the Antrobus family, allegorizing the alternate history of mankind. It was claimed by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, authors of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, that much of the play was the result of unacknowledged{{dubious|date=December 2024}} borrowing from James Joyce's last work.Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson published a pair of reviews-cum-denunciations entitled "The Skin of Whose Teeth?" in the Saturday Review immediately after the play's debut; these created a huge uproar at the time. Campbell's {{cite book |title=Mythic Worlds, Modern Words |year=2004 |location=Novato, California |publisher=New World Library |pages=257–266 |isbn=978-1-57731-406-6 |mode=cs2}} reprints the reviews and discusses the controversy.{{cite book |title=Pathways to Bliss |first=Joseph |last=Campbell |year=2005 |location=Novato, California |publisher=New World Library |pages=[https://archive.org/details/pathwaystoblissm00camp/page/121 121–123] |isbn=978-1-57731-471-4 |url=https://archive.org/details/pathwaystoblissm00camp/page/121 }}

In his novel The Ides of March (1948), Wilder reconstructed the characters and events leading to, and culminating in, the assassination of Julius Caesar. He had met Jean-Paul Sartre on a U.S. lecture tour after the war, and was under the influence of existentialism, although rejecting its atheist implications.{{cite book |title=The Art of Thornton Wilder |url=https://archive.org/details/artofthorntonwil0000gold |url-access=registration |first=Malcolm |last=Goldstein |year=1965 |location=Lincoln |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |pages=[https://archive.org/details/artofthorntonwil0000gold/page/19 19–20] |isbn=978-0-80320-057-9}}

In 1954, Tyrone Guthrie encouraged Wilder to rework The Merchant of Yonkers into The Matchmaker. This time the play opened in 1955 and enjoyed a healthy Broadway run of 486 performances with Ruth Gordon in the title role, winning a Tony Award for Guthrie, its director. It became the basis for the hit 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!, with a book by Michael Stewart and score by Jerry Herman.{{cite web |url=http://www.indielondon.co.uk/Theatre-Review/hello-dolly-new-wimbledon-theatre-review |title=Hello Dolly! – New Wimbledon Theatre (Review) |work=indielondon.co.uk |date=March 2008}}

In 1960, Wilder was awarded the first ever Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture.{{cite web|url=https://www.macdowell.org/medal-day-history|title=Macdowell Medalists|accessdate=August 22, 2022}}

In 1962 and 1963, Wilder lived for 20 months in the small town of Douglas, Arizona, apart from family and friends. There he started his longest novel, The Eighth Day, which went on to win the National Book Award. According to Harold Augenbraum in 2009, it "attack[ed] the big questions head on, ... [embedded] in the story of small-town America".{{cite web |url=http://www.nbafictionblog.org/nba-winning-books-blog/1968.html |last=Augenbraum |first=Harold |title=1968: The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder |date=July 23, 2009 |work=National Book Foundation |access-date=March 28, 2012 |archive-date=March 20, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120320200417/http://www.nbafictionblog.org/nba-winning-books-blog/1968.html |url-status=dead }}

His last novel, Theophilus North, was published in 1973, and made into the film Mr. North in 1988.{{cite web |url=https://www.mcall.com/1988/11/17/with-mr-north-danny-huston-gets-his-bearings-as-a-director/ |title=With 'Mr. North,' Danny Huston Gets His Bearings As A Director |date=November 17, 1988 |first=Amy |last=Longsdorf |work=The Morning Call}}

The Library of America republished all of Wilder's plays in 2007, together with some of his writings on the theater and the screenplay of Shadow of a Doubt.{{cite book |title=Collected Plays and Writings on Theater |editor-first=J. D. |editor-last=McClatchy |first=Thornton |last=Wilder |year=2007 |location=New York |publisher=Library of America |isbn=978-1-59853-003-2 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/collectedplayswr0000wild }} In 2009, a second volume was released, containing his first five novels, six early stories, and four essays on fiction.{{cite book |url=http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=306 |first=Thornton |last=Wilder |title=The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926–1948 |isbn=978-1-59853-045-2|year=2009 |publisher=Library of America }} Finally, the third and final volume in the Library of America series on Wilder was released in 2011, containing his last two novels The Eighth Day and Theophilus North, as well as four autobiographical sketches.{{cite book |title=The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings |editor-first=J. D. |editor-last=McClatchy |first=Thornton |last=Wilder |year=2011 |location=New York |publisher=Library of America |isbn=978-1-59853-146-6}}

Six years after Wilder's death, Samuel Steward wrote in his autobiography that he had sexual relations with him.{{cite book | title =The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life | editor-first =Jeremy | editor-last= Mulderig | location = Chicago | publisher = University of Chicago Press | date =2018 | pages =118–124}} In 1937, Gertrude Stein had given Steward, then a college professor, a letter of introduction to Wilder. According to Steward, Alice B. Toklas told him that Wilder liked him and that Wilder had reported he was having trouble starting the third act of Our Town until he and Steward walked around Zürich all night in the rain and the next day wrote the whole act, opening with a crowd in a rainy cemetery.{{cite book |editor-last=Steward |editor-first=Samuel M. |title=Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas |chapter = The Memoir | first = Samuel M. | last = Steward |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |year=1977 |isbn=0-395-25340-3 |pages= 26, 32}} Penelope Niven disputes Steward's claim of a relationship with Wilder and, based on Wilder's correspondence, says Wilder worked on the third act of Our Town over the course of several months and completed it several months before he first met Steward.{{cite book |last=Niven |first=Penelope |title=Thornton Wilder: A Life |publisher=HarperCollins |year=2012 |isbn=978-0-06083-136-3 | pages= 433–437 |url=https://archive.org/details/thorntonwilderli0000nive/page/433 }} Robert Gottlieb, reviewing Penelope Niven's work in The New Yorker in 2013, claimed Wilder had become infatuated with a man, not identified by Gottlieb, and Wilder's feelings were not reciprocated. Gottlieb asserted that "Niven ties herself in knots in her discussion of Wilder's confusing sexuality" and that "His interest in women was unshakably nonsexual." He takes Steward's view that Wilder was a latent homosexual but never comfortable with sex.{{cite magazine |last1=Gottlieb |first1=Robert |title=Man of Letters |magazine=The New Yorker |date=January 7, 2013 |url=http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/07/man-of-letters-5 |access-date=June 17, 2017}}

Wilder had a wide circle of friends, including writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Toklas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Stein; actress Ruth Gordon; fighter Gene Tunney; and socialite Sibyl, Lady Colefax.

From the earnings of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in 1930 Wilder had a house built for his family in Hamden, Connecticut, designed by Alice Trythall Washburn, one of the few female architects working at the time. His sister Isabel lived there for the rest of her life. This became his home base, although he traveled extensively and lived away for significant periods.

File:Thorton_N_Wilder's_gravestone,_Hamden,_CT.jpg

Wilder died of heart failure in his Hamden, Connecticut, house on December 7, 1975, at age 78. He is interred at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hamden.{{Cite book |last=Wilson |first=Scott |title=Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons |edition=3rd |publisher=McFarland & Company, Inc}} (Kindle Location 50886).

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• The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926)
• The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1928):{{cite web |url=http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=254§ion=toc |title=Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater |website=Library of America |access-date=July 14, 2017}}
• "Nascuntur Poetae"
• "Proserpina and the Devil"
• "Fanny Otcott"
• "Brother Fire"
• "The Penny That Beauty Spent"
• "The Angel on the Ship"
• "The Message and Jehanne"
• "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
• "Centaurs"
• "Leviathan"
• "And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead"
• "The Servant's Name Was Malchus"
• "Mozart and the Gray Steward"
• "Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job?"
• "The Flight Into Egypt"
• "The Angel That Troubled the Waters"
• The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931):
• The Long Christmas Dinner
• Queens of France
• Pullman Car Hiawatha
• Love and How to Cure It
• Such Things Only Happen in Books
• The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
• Our Town (1938)—won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

[http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Drama "Drama"]. Past winners & finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 28, 2012.

• The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)
• The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)—won the Pulitzer Prize
• The Matchmaker (1954)—revised from The Merchant of Yonkers
• The Alcestiad: Or, a Life in the Sun (1955)
• Childhood (1960)
• Infancy (1960)
• Plays for Bleecker Street (1962)
• The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Volume I (1997):
• The Long Christmas Dinner
• Queens of France
• Pullman Car Hiawatha
• Love and How to Cure It
• Such Things Only Happen in Books
• The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
• The Drunken Sisters
• Bernice
• The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five
• A Ringing of Doorbells
• In Shakespeare and the Bible
• Someone from Assisi
• Cement Hands
• Infancy
• Childhood
• Youth
• The Rivers Under the Earth
• Our Town

{{colend}}

{{colbegin}}

• The Cabala (1926)
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)—won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel{{cite web |url=http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Novel |title="Novel": Past winners & finalists by category |website=The Pulitzer Prizes |access-date=March 28, 2012}}
• The Woman of Andros (1930)—based on Andria, a comedy by Terence
• Heaven's My Destination (1935)
• Ides of March (1948)
• The Eighth Day (1967)—won the National Book Award for Fiction{{cite web |url=https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-1968 |title=National Book Awards – 1968 |website=National Book Foundation |access-date=March 28, 2012}} (With an essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
• Theophilus North (1973)—reprinted as Mr. North following the appearance of the film of the same name

{{colend}}

• {{cite book |last=Wilder |first=Thornton |editor-last=McClatchy |editor-first=J. D. |title=Thornton Wilder, Collected Plays and Writings on Theater |series=Library of America |volume=172 |location=New York |publisher=Library of America |year=2007 |isbn=978-1-59853-003-2 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/collectedplayswr0000wild }}
• {{cite book |last=Wilder |first=Thornton |editor-last=McClatchy |editor-first=J. D. |title=Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926–1948 |series=Library of America |volume=194 |location=New York |publisher=Library of America |year=2009 |isbn=978-1-59853-045-2}}
• {{cite book |last=Wilder |first=Thornton |editor-last=McClatchy |editor-first=J. D. |title=Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings |series=Library of America |volume=222 |location=New York |publisher=Library of America |year=2011 |isbn=978-1-59853-146-6}}

• Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - co-written by Wilder with Sally Benson and Alma Reville

• Gallagher-Ross, Jacob. 2018. "Theaters of the Everyday". Evanston: Northwestern University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-8101-3666-3}}.
• {{cite magazine |last=Gottlieb |first=Robert |author-link=Robert Gottlieb |date=January 7, 2013 |title=Man of Letters: The Case of Thornton Wilder |magazine=The New Yorker |volume=88 |issue=42 |pages=71–76 |url=http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/07/man-of-letters-5 |access-date=October 24, 2014}}
• Kennedy, Harold J. 1978. "No Pickle, No Performance. An Irreverent Theatrical Excursion from Tallulah to Travolta". Doubleday & Co.

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{{commons category}}

• {{official website|http://www.thorntonwilder.com/}}
• {{StandardEbooks|Standard Ebooks URL=https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thornton-wilder}}
• {{Gutenberg author |id=54602 |name=Thornton Wilder}}
• {{Internet Archive author|sname=Thornton Niven Wilder}}
• {{Librivox author |id=17360}}
• [http://www.twildersociety.org/ The Thornton Wilder Society]
• {{cite journal|url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4887/the-art-of-fiction-no-16-thornton-wilder|title=Thornton Wilder, The Art of Fiction No. 16|author=Richard H. Goldstone|journal=The Paris Review|volume=Winter 1956|issue=15|date=Winter 1956}}
• {{Find a Grave|1103|access-date=May 28, 2009}}
• {{IBDB name}} Retrieved on May 18, 2009
• {{iobdb name|683}}
• [https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadID=00403 Thornton Wilder Collection] at the Harry Ransom Center
• [http://www.twildersociety.org/biography/ Biography from The Thornton Wilder Society]
• [http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/apr17.html Today in History, The Library of Congress, April 17]
• Thornton Wilder Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• Thornton Wilder Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• [https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_4078444 Finding aid to Thornton Wilder letters at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.]
• [https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.WILDER Guide to the Thornton Wilder Papers 1939–1968] at the [https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/scrc/ University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center]

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