| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
xvi, 832 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Summary |
A fascinating, three-dimensional portrait of one of America's greatest playwrights, novelists, and literary icons. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [713]-804) and index." -- "The art of writing" -- Distant sons -- "Flowering into literature" -- "Heroes" -- "His own tune" -- "Choice souls" -- "All my faults and virtues" -- "Millstones" -- "The 'way within'" -- "My real vocation" -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- "The finest bridge in all Peru" -- Preparation and circumstance -- "Variety, variety" -- "Home" -- "Strands and threads" -- Our living and out dying -- The village and the stars -- "Chalk...or fire" -- "preserverance" -- "Seeing, knowing and telling" -- "The eternal family" -- "The closing of the door" -- "Wartime" -- "Post-war adjustment exercise" -- Searching for the right way -- Kaleidoscopic views -- "The human adventure" -- "Tapestry" -- "Life and death". |
| Summary |
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. -- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject |
Wilder, Thornton, 1897-1975.
|
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Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.
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| Added Author |
Albee, Edward, 1928-
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| ISBN |
9780060831363 hardcover |
|
0060831367 hardcover |
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