Pulitzer
Prize-winning American playwright and novelist Thornton Invent Wilder
was a prolific writer prominent in twentieth-century literature. A
discreet homosexual, his sexual proclivities were kept far out of the
limelight

This is the fiftieth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian
authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that period)
who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay people
telling what life is, and was, during an important time of history.

Family Background and Education
Wilder
was born in Madison, Wisconsin on April 17, 1897, though he spent most
of his boyhood in Berkeley, California. As an adolescent, Wilder
isolated himself in academic projects, heeding his father's admonitions
for constant self-improvement.

Wilder's
twin brother died at birth, but his other siblings achieved varying
levels of prominence. His older brother Amos became a well-known
theologian; his sister Charlotte became a poet who, after a promising
beginning, suffered a debilitating nervous breakdown that resulted in
her being institutionalized for much of her life; his youngest sister
Janet became a zoologist. The sibling with whom Wilder was closest was
Isabel, who never married; she and Wilder lived together in Hamden,
Connecticut after the deaths of their parents.

At
fifteen the budding playwright was cast as Lady Cracknel in Oscar
Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, but his strict father forbade
this drag role. Later, Wilder delighted in playing central characters in
his own plays, such as the Stage Manager in Our Town and Mr. Autobus in
The Skin of Our Teeth.

Wilder
graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915 and then entered Oberlin
College, where he studied Greek and Latin. In 1917, he transferred to
Yale University. After serving eight months in the Coast Artillery Corps
during World War I, he returned to Yale, where he received his B. A. in
1920. In 1926, he was awarded an M. A. in French literature from
Princeton.

Wilder's first professional theatrical success was The
Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), an allegorical farce about servants taking
over their employer's house. This was followed closely by the critical
success of his first published novel The Cabala (1926). Inspired by a
trip to Italy, the novel details the interwoven lives of privileged
aristocrats engaged in power struggles into which the visiting American
narrator is recruited to play a crucial role.
Friendships among the Lost Generation

Wilder's
warmest friendships included Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas whom he
met in Chicago in 1934, when he was teaching comparative literature at
the University of Chicago. Through them he befriended many of the gay
artists in their circle. Like other writers of this period, Wilder's
energies were devoted to the production of vibrant artworks that were
allusive and symbolic, converting his personal circumstances into
universal myths.

Broaching "The Subject"
For all the
liberation of the Jazz Age and the period following, homosexuality was
only discreetly discussed among writers of the Lost Generation. Samuel
Steward (1909-1993), Wilder's friend, recorded a conversation in the
1930s with Gertrude Stein in a rare broaching of "The Subject":



The
relationship between Wilder and his one documented companion, Steward,
may have begun as a furtive sexual fling in Zurich in 1937. Steward, a
writer, pornographer, tattoo artist, and one-time college professor,
was, in pointed contrast to Wilder, open and adventurous. He wrote
popular erotic gay works in the 1970s under the pseudonym Phil Andros.

Wilder
seems to have backed away from Steward after several awkward
encounters. Intimate affection eventually became fond intellectual
acquaintance. Typical of some gay men of the era, Wilder preferred to
play the role of the perennial Respectable Bachelor. Although he never
publicly discussed his homosexuality, later in his life he is believed
to have had discreet affairs with younger men.

A Private Public Life
Wilder
is the only writer to receive Pulitzer Prizes for both literature (The
Bridge of San Luis Rye, 1927) and drama (Our Town, 1938; The Skin of Our
Teeth, 1943).

Heaven's My Destination (1935), Wilder's first
novel set in America, satirizes an evangelical traveling salesman and
fundamentalism. For many years the author regarded this as his best
work.

In the play, Our Town, one of the twentieth century's most
frequently produced dramas, the small town of Grover’s Corners, New
Hampshire is a sort of Any town, U.S.A. Wilder presents a charming and
folksy celebration of the daily lives, the simple loves, and the hopeful
relationships of a typical American town's inhabitants. We witness
their traditions of church, childhood, marriage. We confront the town's
deceased ancestors in the most timeless tradition of all: death.
The
Skin of Our Teeth is a broad apocalyptic farce in which the many Ages of
Man clash on one stage. Ice Age meets Global Warming meets War meets
Disaster. Dinosaurs roam the backyard. Archetypes collide. Homemaker
battles with Femme Fatale. Climatic and man-made catastrophes destroy
civilizations through time-lapsed millennia, but the Family of Man (ably
represented by the Autobus household) manages to rebuild with comical
persistence, always surviving by the skin of our teeth. Produced in the
midst of World War II, the play offers optimism while frankly
acknowledging the perils that beset human life and continuity.

During
World War II, Wilder enlisted in the armed services, eventually
becoming a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force and earning the Legion of
Merit and the Bronze Star.

After the war, he reworked an earlier
play, The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), a comedy set in New York in the
1880s, that features the adventures of a neighborhood matchmaker, Dolly
Levi, who eventually snares herself the perfect husband. It was not much
of a success originally, but it became The Matchmaker (1955), a popular
vehicle for Ruth Gordon, and it evolved into the even more popular
Jerry Herman-Michael Stewart musical Hello, Dolly! (1964).

Amid
this theatrical flurry, Wilder also managed to produce more novels. The
Woman of Andros (1930) concerns a courtesan's passionate love for a
younger man. In The Ides of March (1947), Julius Caesar is a convenient
historical character around whom Wilder weaves his own musings about
ultimate power. The Eighth Day (1967) begins as a murder mystery where a
man is wrongly convicted of killing a neighbor. The adventures of his
escape and the repercussions of the murder become occasions for
meditations upon time, identity, and existence.

Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rye have joined the canon of high school reading lists.
Still,
it is a mistake to think that Wilder's works are complacent or
unchallenging; he always nudged the American values he depicted with
provocative afterthoughts.

Thornton Wilder died on December 7,
1975. His many honors, in addition to three Pulitzer Prizes, included
the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
(1952), the first Presidential Medal of Freedom (1962), and the
National Book Committee's Medal for Literature (1968).
In Wilder's
public and personal life, the "love that dared not speak its name"
usually remained unspoken. One can only wonder whether he might have
addressed more explicitly the question of homosexuality (and its
repression) had he lived in a more tolerant time or place.
Jeff Johnson

Bibliography
Plays
The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926)
An Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1928)
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 a Pulitzer Prize
The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) — won a Pulitzer Prize
The Matchmaker (1954) — revised from The Merchant of Yonkers
The Lacertian: Or, A Life In The Sun (1955)
Childhood (1960)
Infancy (1960)
Plays for Becker 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

Novels
The Cabala (1926)
The Bridge of San Luis Rye (1927) — won a Pulitzer Prize
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 a National Book Award
Theophilus North (1973)

Collections
Wilder,
Thornton; McClatchy, J. D., ed. (2007). Thornton Wilder, Collected
Plays and Writings on Theater. Library of America. vol. 172. New York:
Library of America. ISBN 9781598530032.
Wilder, Thornton; McClatchy,
J. D., ed. (2009). Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rye and
Other Novels 1926–1948. Library of America. vol. 194. New York: Library
of America. ISBN 9781598530452.