Content Introduction I chapter Thoronton Wilder 1

Content
Introduction
I chapter Thoronton Wilder 1
1.1 Briefly about Thoronton Wilder life 2
1.2 Thoronton Wilder’s career 3
II chapter Kurt Vonnegut‟s Slaughterhouse-Five: A Postmodernist Study 4
2.1 What's the story of "Our Town"? 5
2.2 Critical Analysis 6
Conclusion
References


Introduction


In the late 1970s while I was a dramaturgy student in the Graduate Program at the Yale School of Drama, I had the privilege of being hired for a work-study job at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for several summers. Thornton Wilder had passed on in 1975 and his papers, photos, and much of his writing had been donated to the library. My deep history connection to Wilder began then as I was hired as an Archival Assistant to continue the process of “reviewing and filing” the accumulated wealth of correspondence, photographs, and manuscripts. I encountered letters by luminaries from the twentieth century, leaving my hands trembling daily as I handled them. Their words echoed across time to me, a young man who had grown up in South Dakota and attended a one-room schoolhouse in the 1950s. I also encountered correspondence connected to the writing and first production...
Thoronton Wilder

I chapter Thoronton Wilder
1.1 Briefly about Thoronton Wilder life
Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor and later a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Thornton Niven.
Wilder had four siblings as well as a twin who was stillborn. All of the surviving Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China when their father was stationed in Hong Kong and Shanghai as U.S. Consul General. Thornton's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, became Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. He was a noted poet and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. Their sister Isabel Wilder was an accomplished writer. They had two more sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist.


Wilder as Mr. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth, 1948


Wilder began writing plays while at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual. According to a classmate, "We left him alone, just left him alone. And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference." His family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 1910. He attended the English China Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai but returned with his mother and siblings to California in 1912 because of the unstable political conditions in China at the time. Thornton graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915.


After having served a three-month enlistment in the Army's Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams, Rhode Island, in World War I (rising to the rank of corporal), he attended Oberlin College before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920 at Yale University, where he refined his writing skills as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a literary society. He earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926.
Wilder never discussed being homosexual publicly or in his writings. Six years after Wilder’s death, the pornographer Samuel Steward wrote in his autobiography that he had had sexual relations with him. Wilder was introduced to Steward by Gertrude Stein, who at the time regularly corresponded with both of them. The third act of Our Town was allegedly drafted after a long walk, during a brief affair with Steward in Zürich, Switzerland.


Wilder in his Yale College graduation photo (1920)
In Penelope Niven's biography Thornton Wilder: A Life, she provides considerable epistolary evidence that the third act of Our Town was not written in response to any walk, conversation or affair with Samuel Steward but was begun before Wilder met Steward and was not finished until several months afterward. Niven also raises doubts about Steward's uncorroborated and unsubstantiated claims of having been Wilder's lover.
Wilder had a wide circle of friends, including writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Alice B. Toklas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Gertrude Stein; actress Ruth Gordon; fighter Gene Tunney; and socialite Sibyl, Lady Colefax.


Thornton Wilder on the cover of Time magazine – January 12, 1953
From the earnings of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in 1930 Wilder built a house for his family in Hamden, Connecticut. His sister Isabel lived there for the rest of her life. This became his home base, although he traveled extensively and lived away for significant periods. He died in this house on December 7, 1975, of heart failure. He was interred at Mount Carmel Cemetery, Hamden, Connecticut.