Thornton Wilder: A Life - Softcover

Niven, Penelope

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060831375 ISBN 13: 9780060831370

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2013

Synopsis

"Thornton Wilder: A Life brings readers face to face with the extraordinary man who made words come alive around the world, on the stage and on the page." --James Earl Jones, actor

"Comprehensive and wisely fashioned....A splendid and long needed work." --Edward Albee, playwright

Thornton Wilder--three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, creator of such enduring stage works as Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and beloved novels like Bridge of San Luis Ray and Theophilus North--was much more than a pivotal figure in twentieth century American theater and literature. He was a world-traveler, a student, a teacher, a soldier, an actor, a son, a brother, and a complex, intensely private man who kept his personal life a secret. In Thornton Wilder: A Life, author Penelope Niven pulls back the curtain to present a fascinating, three-dimensional portrait one of America's greatest playwrights, novelists, and literary icons.

About this title

About the Author

Penelope Niven is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of poet Carl Sandburg and photographer Edward Steichen, as well as Swimming Lessons, a memoir, and Voices and Silences, coauthored with the actor James Earl Jones. She is the recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Thornton Wilder Visiting Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and other fellowships and awards.

From the Back Cover

Thornton Wilder: A Life, the first biography of the playwright and novelist since 1983, is based on unprecedented research: thousands of pages of letters, journals, manuscripts, and other documentary evidence of Wilder's life, work, and times. Biographer Penelope Niven mined Wilder's personal archives for more than a decade, and has produced a book that illuminates his professional life anew and reveals an enigmatic, intensely private man who wandered the world, writing, he said, for and about everybody. Even today, he has a global audience. His novels, including The Bridge of San Luis Rey, remain in print all over the world. His plays, especially the iconic Our Town and the revolutionary Skin of Our Teeth, are touchstones of modern theater.

Richly detailed, Thornton Wilder: A Life brings one of our country's most beloved playwrights to center stage and unseals his hidden inner self, apparent only here and there in his art and in his papers.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060831375
• ISBN 13: 9780060831370
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 864