His sister, named Isabel, lived there for the rest of her life. The money he earned off of “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” was used by Wilder in 1930 to build a house for his family in Hamden, Connecticut. He also won a US National Book Award for “The Eighth Day”. Thornton won three Pulitzer Prizes for the plays “Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth” and for the novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”. Even though he considered himself to be a teacher first and a writer second, he continued writing all his life, being given the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1957 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the year 1963. Thornton went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor. The Second World War saw Wilder rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the US Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, and later in Italy until 1945. While in Chicago, he became famous as a lecturer and was chronicled on the celebrity pages. After his second novel was published and brought him commercial success, he resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928.įrom 1930 until 1937, he taught at the University of Chicago, during which time he published his translation of Andre Obey’s own adaptation of the story “Le Vol de Lucrece” as “Lucrece”. He got his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in the year 1926.Īfter graduation, he went to Italy and studied archaeology and Italian as part of an eight month long residency at The American Academy in Rome, and then he taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey starting in 1921. It was here that he refined his writing abilities as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a literary society.

He graduated from Berkeley High School in the year 1915.Īfter he served a three month long enlistment in the Army’s Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams, Rhode Island, during World War I (rising to the rank of corporal), he went to Oberlin College before he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in the year 1920 at Yale University.

He started writing plays while at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he got teased by classmates as being overly intellectual and he did not fit in. Charlotte Wilder was also a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin was a zoologist, while their sister Isabel was an accomplished writer on her own. Thornton’s older brother, named Amos, became Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, and was a noted poet and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. All of the surviving Wilder kids spent part of their childhood while their dad was stationed in Shanghai and Hong Kong as US Consul General. He had four siblings along with a twin that was stillborn. Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin on April 17, 1897, the son of Amos Parker Wilder (a newspaper editor and later US diplomat) and Isabella Thornton Niven.

Thornton wilder 1938