Thornton Wilder

"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths...

This beautiful new edition features an eye-opening Afterword written by Tappan Wilder that includes Thornton Wilder's unpublished notes and other illuminating photographs and documentary material. Our Town was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the small village of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned...

First published in 1948, The Ides of March is a brilliant epistolary novel of the Rome of Julius Caesar. Through imaginary letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of its magnetic personalities. In this novel, the Caesar of history becomes Caesar the human being as he appeared to his family, his legions, his Rome, and his empire in the months just before his death. In Wilder's inventive narrative, all...

Presents the text of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize-winning play in which the Eternal Family, George and Maggie Antrobus, their children Gladys and Henry, and their maid Sabina, endure thousands of years of near disasters.

"The author of such classics as Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder was a born storyteller and dramatist--rare talents on glorious display in this volume of more than three hundred letters he penned to a vast array of famous friends and beloved relatives. Through Wilder's correspondence, readers can eavesdrop on his conversations with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Noël Coward, Gene Tunney, Laurence Olivier,...

Presents an anthology of novels, short stories, and essays.

Two early novels first published in 1926 and in 1930 respectively, marking the debut of a new American stylist according to contemporary reviews. In Wilder's first novel, The Cabala (1926), Samuele, an American student, spends a year in the fabulously decadent world of post-World War I Rome. He experiences first-hand the waning days of a secret community--a "cabala" composed of decaying European royalty, eccentric expatriate Americans, even a great...

A certain old merchant of Yonkers is so rich in 1800 that he decides to take a wife. He employs a matchmaker a woman who subsequently becomes involved with two of his menial clerks, assorted young and lovely ladies, and the headwaiter at an expensive restaurant where this swift farce runs headlong into a hilarious complications. After everyone gets straightened out romantically and has his heart's desire, the merchant finds himself affianced to the...