,
Martha Scott, and
John Craven in the original
Broadway production of
Our Town, published in 1938, which won the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama magazine After graduating, Wilder went to Italy and studied
archaeology and Italian (1920–21) as part of an eight-month residency at
The American Academy in Rome, and then taught French at the
Lawrenceville School in
Lawrenceville, New Jersey, beginning in 1921. It was published by Longmans Green in 1933. In Chicago, he became famous as a lecturer and was chronicled on the celebrity pages. In 1938, he won the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play
Our Town, and he won the prize again in 1943 for his play
The Skin of Our Teeth.
World War II saw Wilder rise to the rank of
lieutenant colonel in the
U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. He received several awards for his military service. He went on to be a visiting professor at
Harvard University, where he served for a year as the
Charles Eliot Norton professor. Though he considered himself a teacher first and a writer second, he continued to write all his life, receiving the
Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1957 and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. In 1968 he won the
National Book Award for his novel
The Eighth Day. Wilder translated plays by
André Obey and
Jean-Paul Sartre. He wrote the
libretti of two operas,
The Long Christmas Dinner, composed by
Paul Hindemith, and
The Alcestiad, composed by
Louise Talma and based on his own play.
Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired, asked him to write the screenplay of his thriller
Shadow of a Doubt, and he completed a first draft for the film. Since then its popularity has grown enormously. The book is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and
film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events before the disaster. Wilder wrote
Our Town, a popular play (and later film) set in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. It was inspired in part by
Dante's Purgatorio and in part by his friend
Gertrude Stein's novel
The Making of Americans. Wilder suffered from
writer's block while writing the final act.
Our Town employs a choric narrator called the
Stage Manager and a
minimalist set to underscore the human experience. Wilder himself played the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in
summer stock productions. Following the daily lives of the Gibbs and Webb families, as well as the other inhabitants of Grover's Corners, the play illustrates the importance of the universality of the simple, yet meaningful lives of all people in the world in order to demonstrate the value of appreciating life. The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize. His play
The Skin of Our Teeth opened in New York on November 18, 1942, featuring
Fredric March and
Tallulah Bankhead. Again, the themes are familiar – the timeless human condition; history as progressive, cyclical, or entropic; literature, philosophy, and religion as the touchstones of civilization. Three acts dramatize the travails of the Antrobus family, allegorizing the
alternate history of mankind. It was claimed by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, authors of
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, that much of the play was the result of unacknowledged borrowing from
James Joyce's last work. In his novel
The Ides of March (1948), Wilder reconstructed the characters and events leading to, and culminating in, the assassination of
Julius Caesar. He had met
Jean-Paul Sartre on a U.S. lecture tour after the war, and was under the influence of
existentialism, although rejecting its
atheist implications. In 1954,
Tyrone Guthrie encouraged Wilder to rework
The Merchant of Yonkers into
The Matchmaker. This time the play opened in 1955 and enjoyed a healthy Broadway run of 486 performances with
Ruth Gordon in the title role, winning a
Tony Award for Guthrie, its director. It became the basis for the hit 1964 musical
Hello, Dolly!, with a book by
Michael Stewart and score by
Jerry Herman. In 1960, Wilder was awarded the first ever
Edward MacDowell Medal by
The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture. In 1962 and 1963, Wilder lived for 20 months in the small town of
Douglas, Arizona, apart from family and friends. There he started his longest novel,
The Eighth Day, which went on to win the
National Book Award. His last novel,
Theophilus North, was published in 1973, and made into the film
Mr. North in 1988. The Emporium is Thornton Wilder’s final, long-unfinished play, later completed by Kirk Lynn from more than 300 pages of archival drafts discovered at Yale. Premiering in 2024 at Alley Theatre in Houston and receiving an Off-Broadway run in 2026, the play follows John, an orphan who arrives in a vast, mysterious department store—the titular Emporium—that seems to contain everything yet offers no clear path to entry or belonging. Blending surreal, Kafka-esque elements with Wilder’s signature philosophical tone, the store becomes a metaphor for work, identity, longing, love, and the elusive search for meaning, with the audience often implicated as participants in this symbolic world. The Library of America republished all of Wilder's plays in 2007, together with some of his writings on the theater and the screenplay of
Shadow of a Doubt. In 2009, a second volume was released, containing his first five novels, six early stories, and four essays on fiction. Finally, the third and final volume in the Library of America series on Wilder was released in 2011, containing his last two novels
The Eighth Day and
Theophilus North, as well as four autobiographical sketches. ==Personal life==