Wilder, Thornton (Vol. 1) - Wilder, Thornton 1897–

Wilder, Thornton 1897–

An American playwright and novelist, Wilder has won the Pulitzer Prize three times. His best known works include Our Town, The Matchmaker, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and The Skin of Our Teeth. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 15-16.)

[Thorton Wilder's] The Bridge [of San Luis Rey] has become a classic of American fiction…. Despite its technical weaknesses, it has all the intellectual scope, depth of feeling, and complexity of character that make a mature and aesthetically satisfying vision. It was an unusual, courageous act in the twenties for a serious writer to affirm the moral nature and value of love—a subject most serious writers were associating in one way or another with sex. The almost inherently banal and sentimental "higher" manifestations of love were being abandoned to the hack writers or rejected as "genteel." But as he defines love in The Bridge, it is a most...

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