Thornton Wilder: A Life - Hardcover

Niven, Penelope

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060831367 ISBN 13: 9780060831363

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2012

Synopsis

Thornton Wilder The definitive, and only available, biography of one of the greatest American playwrights, novelists, and literary icons--and the first based on unprecedented access to the writer's papers, including private family records--presenting a three-dimensional portrait of the artist as never seen before.

About this title

Review:

"Lucid, elegantly written...there is just enough shrewd literary analysis to make us understand why this prodigally gifted writer so richly deserves an audience beyond the 12th grade."--Daily Beast

"Deeply researched and fluidly readable."--New York Times

"Essential. . . . Studiously researched and measured. . . . The great strength of 'Thornton Wilder: A Life' is how well it fuses the early years of the Wilder biography with the themes that informed his works."--Chicago Tribune

"Capacious and authoritative."--Harper's Magazine

"The best kind of literary biography, one likely to send the reader back (or perhaps for the first time) to the author's works."--Washington Post

"This new biography of Wilder -- comprehensive and wisely fashioned -- gives us sufficient view of his methods, his public and private life, and the reaches of his mind...This book is a splendid and long needed work."----Edward Albee

"Almost everybody knows OUR TOWN, but very few people really know Thornton Wilder. Penelope Niven's fascinating biography changes that once and for all...Meticulously researched, Niven's book reads like a riveting novel."----James Earl Jones

"The author admits to a 'decade of close study of . . . primary sources' in preparation for her biography of distinguished American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. The result, fully displayed on every page of this definitive treatment, is a joyous presentation of detail."--Booklist (starred review)

"Fast-paced and engaging, this work is essential for academic readers with an interest in American literature and culture. It will also appeal to the more general reader of American biography."--Library Journal (starred review)

"Niven complements her own clear, lyrical voice with the eloquent words of Steichen's contemporaries."--New York Times Book Review on Steichen: A Biography

From the Back Cover:

Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.
--Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder: A Life, the first biography of the playwright and novelist since 1983, is also the first to be based on thousands of pages of letters, journals, manuscripts, and other documentary evidence of Wilder's life, work, and times. For more than a decade, biographer Penelope Niven has worked with unprecedented access to Wilder's papers, including his family's private journals and records, searching for the secrets that illuminate Wilder's public life and work, as well as the hidden inner self sometimes concealed and sometimes revealed in his art and in his papers.

Thornton Wilder was a multifaceted man: a teacher, novelist, playwright, lecturer, actor, musician, soldier, man of letters, outspoken citizen, and international public figure. He was also an enigmatic, intensely private man. He belonged to a close-knit, complicated family--two brilliant parents, four gifted siblings, and the specter of his twin brother lost at birth. His biography is also a compelling family saga, starring Thornton Wilder, with strong supporting roles played by his father, mother, brother, and sisters.

He was a gypsy, wandering the world, writing, he said, for and about everybody--a fact international audiences still embrace. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Eighth Day, and his other novels are still read in the United States and abroad. His plays, especially the iconic Our Town and the revolutionary Skin of Our Teeth, are still performed on stages around the globe.

Yet despite the international fame and visibility of Wilder the writer, far too little has been known or understood about Wilder the man--until now. Comprehensively researched and richly detailed, Thornton Wilder: A Life brings the private man center stage and sheds new light on his published and unpublished work.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0060831367
• ISBN 13: 9780060831363
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 832