Thornton Wilder

June 11, 2012
Fans and scholars of Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder will delight in Niven’s comprehensive and engaging biography. Niven (Carl Sandburg: A Biography) combed through the author’s many published and unpublished personal writings (including letters, manuscripts, journals, and family records) to create a “substantial scaffolding of facts that shape and support a narrative of his life and work.” A bookish second son, Wilder was painfully micromanaged by an overbearing father who was distressed by Wilder’s theatrical and literary inclinations—though such inclinations allowed him to take full financial responsibility for his parents and sisters once he found commercial success with the publication of The Bridge of San Luis Ray in 1928. “Wilder once called himself the poet laureate of the family,” and Niven gives ample evidence that this title was deserved. He never married (questions remain about his sexuality; it was one of the few subjects he didn’t write about), but remained devoted to his immediate family and close friends. Through Wilder’s own words, the reader is privy to his arrogant thrills and frequent bouts of self-doubt. Chronicling Wilder’s successes and failures in various literary forms (novels, plays, lectures), Niven includes brief criticism and reviews with each of his major works. The real value of her extensive research comes in the seamless weaving of letters and journals that make up the full tapestry of the writer’s life. Photos. Agent: Barbara Hogenson, the Barbara Hogensen Agency.

Starred review from June 15, 2012

Popular and critically acclaimed American writer Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize (for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth). Niven (writer in residence, Salem Coll.; Carl Sandburg: A Biography) had access to previously unavailable primary materials both from Wilder's sister's extensive accumulation of materials, now at Yale's Beinecke Library, and from his nephew and literary executor, who made more information available, thus enabling readers to gain deeper understanding of Wilder the man and Wilder the scholar. Although Wilder is at the center of this work, it relates very much to his family as well, providing the most complete, in-depth portrait of the author to date. Niven presents a detailed picture of Wilder from his youthful writing attempts to his success as a mature novelist and playwright who counted F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein as friends. VERDICT Fast-paced and engaging, this work is essential for academic readers with an interest in American literature and culture. It will also appeal to the more general reader of American biography.--Alison M. Lewis, Drexel Univ., Philadelphia

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2012
A satisfying and insightful, if overlong, picture of a solitary writer who never stopped being a family man. There are times reading this new biography by Niven (Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water, 2004, etc.) when readers may wonder why a book about Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is so inordinately concerned with the lives of his siblings. Biographical overkill, or is there some kind of a point? Both. For Niven, understanding Wilder's family is simply vital to understanding Wilder, whose books and plays dig away at how people become who they are. His loving but repressive father, Amos, raised five children all over the world (while serving as President Taft's consul to China) and micromanaged their lives every step of the way; they in turn bore the burden of his influence. At one extreme is Thornton; the son from whom Amos expected the least became a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright whose major dramas, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, are anchored by families as hopeful and anxiety-ridden as his own. At the other is sister Charlotte, an esteemed poet whose artistic life was cut short by tormented lesbian desires and schizophrenia. Wilder's own sex life is a mystery; like Henry James, he left only scant evidence that he ever had one. He had other things on his mind, as Niven ably sums up: "How do you live? How do you bear the unbearable? How do you handle the various dimensions of love, of faith, of the human condition? How do universal elements forge every unique, individual life? And where does the family fit in the cosmic scheme of things?" For Wilder, the old questions were the only ones worth considering. Although at times overwhelmed by her own research, Niven creates a perceptive, indispensable portrait of a productive and restlessly intellectual life.

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