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In Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake, the main character fondly remembers starring in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This is Wilder’s best-known play, which debuted in 1938 to mixed reviews but earned him a Pulitzer Prize that same year, making him the only writer to have received the award in both fiction and drama.
Born in Wisconsin to a father who was a newspaper editor and diplomat, the young author was exposed to travel and writing early on. He attended Oberlin and Yale for undergraduate study, and Princeton for graduate school. He also studied Italian and archaeology at the American Academy of Rome.
Wilder volunteered for military service in both World Wars. In the first, he spent eight months with a U.S. Coast Guard artillery unit. In World War II, with three Pulitzers under his belt, he served in the Air Force and was eventually promoted to lieutenant colonel. He was awarded the Legion of Merit Bronze Star, the Legion d’honneur, and the Order of the British Empire.
In 1942, Wilder collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock as a screenwriter for the movie Shadow of a Doubt. By production’s end, Wilder was away at war, and other writers were brought in for edits. The director spoke highly of him and praised “the contribution of Thornton Wilder to the preparation of this production” in the opening credits.
Our Town is quite a departure from the excitement of war, international travel, and Hitchcock movies. It’s considered an American classic for its portrayal of life in a small American town, but Wilder started writing it on one of many overseas trips. The idea came to him on an archaeological cemetery dig in Rome. He examined the tombs belonging to the Aurelius family in candlelight while traffic rushed nearby, and felt the relationship between the past and present differently than before. In a letter to his parents, Wilder wrote, “We were clutching at the past to recover the loves and pieties and habits of the Aurelius family, while the same elements were passing above us.”
With Our Town, Wilder wanted to portray ordinary people having ordinary lives, which even still contain extraordinary events like weddings and deaths. He worked on the play for over six years, in New Hampshire and New York, but also in Zurich, where he learned experimental theater methods introduced in Weimar Germany. Our Town‘s opening performances in Princeton and Boston received negative reviews. Audiences didn’t care for the experimental techniques Wilder used, such as forgoing sets and props to have actors mime the action. Breaking the fourth wall by having the stage manager speak directly to the audience was likewise poorly received. Eleanor Roosevelt remarked that the play “moved and depressed [her] beyond words.”
However, once on Broadway, it was an instant success, evidenced by Wilder’s win of the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Wilder himself frequently played the stage manager. The next year, Our Town was licensed for amateur rights and was soon being performed virtually everywhere, by people of all ages, in part because it didn’t require a set or props.
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