was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on this date in 1897. As they so often do, Minnesota Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac has an interesting profile.
As a boy, [Wilder] lived near a university theater where they performed Greek dramas, and his mother let him participate as a member of the chorus. He never forgot the experience, and decided then that he would try to write for the theater someday. He produced his first play, The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), while he was still an undergraduate at Yale.
After graduating from college, his father sent him to Rome, where he worked on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Roman ruins. He later said, “Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again.” The experience inspired him to begin writing fiction about characters caught up in the forces of fate and history. His second novel was The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), about a group of unrelated characters who are all killed by the collapse of a bridge in Peru. That novel was a huge success, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.
Wilder got a job at the University of Chicago, and began to write a series of experimental one-act plays that used almost no scenery or props, and often included an all-knowing character called the Stage Manager. Then, in 1938, he produced the play for which he is best known, Our Town, one of the first major Broadway plays to use almost no stage scenery, so that the audience had to imagine the world in which the characters lived. Wilder said, “Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind—not in things, not in ‘scenery’. . . . [A play] needs only five square feet of boarding and a passion to know what life means to us.”
Our Town is about the New England village of Grover’s Corners, where the characters George Gibbs and Emily Webb grow up, fall in love at the soda fountain, and get married. When Emily dies in childbirth, she gets to relive the day of her twelfth birthday and realizes how little she cherished life while she was alive. She says, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it,—every, every minute?” The play ran for 336 performances on Broadway, and it also won a Pulitzer Prize.
Wilder went on to write many more plays, screenplays and books of fiction. Near the end of his life, he realized that he might not be remembered as well as some writers who had written darker stories, but he said, “My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.”
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