Wilder, Thornton [Niven]
Wilder, Thornton [Niven]( 1897–1975),born in Wisconsin, was reared in China and the U.S., and after graduation from Yale (1920) became a teacher at the Lawrenceville School (1921–28) and a professor of English at the University of Chicago (1930–36). His first book, The Cabala (1926), is a gracefully written and deftly ironic novel, concerning the sophisticated but decaying Italian nobility of the post-World War I period. After producing The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926) at a little theater, he suddenly achieved wide popularity with The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927, Pulitzer Prize), a delicately ironic study of the way Providence has directed disparate lives to one end. His next novels are The Woman of Andros (1930), an urbane treatment of human relations and ethical values in its story of a Greek concubine, based on Terence's Latin comedy Andrea; Heaven's My Destination (1935), an amused, ironic portrait of an...
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