The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder, Jackson R. Bryer, Robin Gibbs Wilder

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062046017
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

Spanning his entire life, The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder is a comprehensive and fascinating collection of the great American writer's correspondence.

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, Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, and Mia Farrow. Equally absorbing are Wilder's intimate letters to his family.

Wilder tells of roller-skating with Walt Disney, remembers an inaugural reception for FDR at the White House, describes his life as a soldier in two World Wars, and recalls dining out with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. In these pages, Thornton Wilder speaks for himself in his own unique, enduring voice—informing, encouraging, instructing, and entertaining with his characteristic wit, heart, and exuberance.

Part One

BEGINNINGS: 1909-1920

THORNTON NIVEN WILDER WAS BORN IN MADISON, WISCONSIN, on April 17, 1897. His twin brother died at birth, and, according to family lore, Wilder himself was so frail that he was carried around on a pillow for the first months of his life. At the time of Wilder’s birth, his father, Amos Parker Wilder, was editor and part owner of the Wisconsin State Journal. By 1901, when Thornton was four years old, his father had acquired a controlling interest in the paper and was well-known in Wisconsin political circles.

Because his parents exerted an unusually strong influence on their children, a brief account of their backgrounds is necessary here. Amos Parker Wilder was born in Maine in 1862, grew up in the state capital of Augusta, and graduated from Yale College, where he was a scholar, singer, orator, editor of one of Yale’s literary magazines, the Courant, and a member of a senior secret society. After graduating in 1884, he taught for two years and then became a journalist, working first as a reporter in Philadelphia. He returned to New Haven to edit the New Haven Palladium, while also working on a doctorate at Yale. He wrote his dissertation on the difficulties and possible solutions of governing American cities, and received his Ph.D. in 1892. When he lost his editorship at the Palladium for attacking political figures who had a financial interest in that newspaper, he left New Haven for a position as an editorial writer on a New York City paper. In 1894, he traveled to the Midwest, intent on finding a newspaper to invest in and work on. He realized his ambition in the university town of Madison, Wisconsin, where, with his savings augmented by loans from friends, he bought a one-quarter interest in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Before the year was out, another important change occurred in his life: twenty-one-year-old Isabella Thornton Niven of Dobbs Ferry, New York, accepted his proposal of marriage, and on December 3, 1894, they married and returned to Madison to live. Isabella was the daughter of the minister of the Presbyterian church in Dobbs Ferry. Her maternal grandfather was Arthur Tappan, cofounder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who, with his brother Lewis, did much to support the antislavery movement. Both men were also prominent in backing the Oberlin Collegiate Institution and probably ensured its survival as Oberlin College. Isabella was a graduate of the Misses Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, where she published poems in the school paper and studied languages, piano, art, and literature. Before her marriage, she attended concerts, the theater, and lectures in New York City and was attuned to the cultural offerings of the day.

The literary interests of Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder were reflected in their habit of regularly reading aloud classics and Scripture during the childhood of the four children who were born during the next five years: Amos Niven (September 18, 1895), Thornton Niven (April 17, 1897), Charlotte Elizabeth (August 28, 1898), and Isabel (January 13, 1900). Amos Parker Wilder, an active Congregational layman, was also very concerned with his family’s religious life and with the cause of temperance.

During the first years of their marriage, because of the loans on the newspaper that Amos Wilder had to repay, money was scarce. Nonetheless, in 1901, they managed to build a cottage on the shores of Lake Mendota in Maple Bluff, just outside the city of Madison, where the family lived each year from early spring until late fall, and Isabella Wilder was able to take a European trip with Madison friends. Amos Parker Wilder almost certainly supplemented his income with lectures on municipal government at the University of Wisconsin, and, as he was becoming a well-known speaker, with engagements on similar subjects around the state. His eloquence was often grounded in his moral certainties, which sometimes strained relationships with political allies. In 1903, this occurred when he changed his paper’s editorial policy from support for the “progressive” wing of the Wisconsin Republican party to the more conservative “stalwarts.” Around this time, he began to explore professional opportunities outside the newspaper business.

In 1906, he sought a position in the consular service, and with the support of Yale friends within the Republican party, he received an appointment as U.S. consul general in Hong Kong. After twelve years of residence in Madison, the Wilder family sailed for Hong Kong from San Francisco only days before the earthquake there. They arrived in Hong Kong on May 7, 1906, shortly after Thornton’s ninth birthday. Life in Hong Kong offered a complete change from the neighborliness of Madison and the activities associated with its homes, shops, and public schools.

Just five months after their arrival in China, the new consul general and his wife decided that Hong Kong was not a good place to rear and educate their children. On October 30, 1906, Isabella Niven Wilder and the four children left Hong Kong, returned to San Francisco, and settled in Berkeley, California, another university town, where the children were enrolled in the local public schools. Their father sent money to support them, supervised their upbringing long-distance through detailed instructions in letters, and saw them on home leaves. Their mother supervised their daily lives and kept Papa informed of their progress; his children wrote to him regularly about their activities and thoughts.

In early spring 1909, Consul General Wilder was promoted and transferred from Hong Kong to Shanghai. Before taking up his new post on June 1, 1909, he paid a short visit to his family in Berkeley. In the fall, he made another trip from Shanghai to California, with a plan for reuniting his family in Shanghai, because he believed it would be a better situation for them than Hong Kong had been. The family reunion did not take place until more than a year later, for Janet Frances, the fifth and final Wilder sibling, was born on June 3, 1910.

In December 1910, Mrs. Wilder embarked on the S.S. Mongolia for Shanghai with her four youngest children. The eldest child, fifteen year-old Amos, was sent to the Thacher School, a boarding school in Ojai, California, established in 1889 by a Yale acquaintance of the senior Wilder. This was one of the country’s first “ranch schools,” where each boy had a horse to care for, took camping trips, and learned wilderness skills, along with partaking in the usual sports and college-preparatory course work.

Mrs. Wilder was physically unwell in Shanghai and distressed by the unsettled political situation in China. Her doctor suggested a change in climate, and in mid-August 1911, she sailed for Europe through the Suez Canal with her two youngest daughters, Isabel, now eleven, and Janet, just over a year old. They landed in Genoa and proceeded to Florence, Italy, where they joined Mrs. Wilder’s younger sister, Charlotte Tappan Niven, and their widowed mother, Elizabeth Lewis Niven. Mrs. Wilder’s sister was running a hostel for the international arm of the Young Women’s Christian Association.

After some time at a German school in Shanghai, Thornton and Charlotte were sent to the China Inland Mission Schools in Chefoo, approximately 450 miles from Shanghai. They enrolled in the spring term of 1911 and remained there until August 1912. Charlotte attended the Girls’ School and Thornton the Boys’; they were permitted to visit with each other for an hour each week. Wilder’s friends at Chefoo included Theodore Wilder (no relation) and Henry Luce.

Amos Parker Wilder took home leave after his wife sailed for Europe. He visited his elder son at Thacher, conducted business, and saw friends in Madison. He consulted with doctors, because he had developed Asian sprue, a digestive disease that had left him in a weakened state. While still in the United States, he made arrangements for Thornton and Charlotte to leave Chefoo before the fall term and to take passage on the S.S. Nile for San Francisco. They arrived in San Francisco in early September 1912. While Charlotte boarded with family friends in Claremont, California, and attended the local public school there, Thornton joined his brother, Amos, at the Thacher School. During Christmas vacation, Thornton and Amos visited Charlotte and stayed with her and the family with whom she boarded. For the three older Wilder children, the important news was that their mother and two youngest sisters, whom they had not seen in over a year, were planning to return to Berkeley in the spring of 1913. A few months later, the family was reunited, although again without their father.

Amos graduated from Thacher in June 1913 and was sent to work in an orchard in northern California before leaving in the fall for Oberlin College. Thornton attended an arts program at the local public school in Berkeley and helped his mother get settled. He did not return to Th...