Word: wilderness
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Already the season's most controversial play, Thornton Wilder's cockeyed The Skin of Our Teeth (TIME, Nov. 30) last week started a louder controversy concerning its source. In the Saturday Review of Literature Sarah Lawrence College's Joseph Campbell and Reader's Digest Editor Henry Morton Robinson blasted Wilder's account of the human race as "an Americanized recreation, thinly disguised, of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake...
During the year: > Many writers, some despairing of interpreting war during a war, found themselves in uniform. Among them: Novelists James Gould Cozzens, Julian Green, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Knight, F. Van Wyck Mason; Playwrights Sidney Kingsley, Thornton Wilder, Laurence Stallings, William Saroyan; Poets Christopher La Farge, Karl Jay Shapiro, Harry Brown; ex-New Yorkers John Cheever, Geoffrey Hellman, Edward Newhouse; Autobiographer Vincent Sheean; Historian Samuel Eliot Morison; Newshawks Jimmy Cannon, Marion Hargrove, Hartzell Spence...
Baldish, bespectacled, 45-year-old Thornton Niven Wilder made news many times before last week. In 1927 he bounced to fame with his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which sold over 250,000 copies and won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1935 his novel Heaven's My Destination, which he described as "diluted Dante," was a Book-of-the-Month choice and a subject for heated discussion. Then & there forswearing fiction for the theater, he emerged in 1938 with Our Town, whose sceneryless stage flabbergasted Broadway, fetched another Pulitzer Prize...
Born in Madison, Wis. of a New England family, Wilder grew up in China (his father was U.S. Consul General at Hong Kong and Shanghai) and California. Even at Yale, from which he graduated in 1920, Wilder gave promise of being one of the coming U.S. literary lights, attracted the favorable attention of William Lyon Phelps and other pundits. A scholarly bachelor with a high, nervous voice, who knows half a dozen languages, speaks in a stumbling rush when excited, he went on teaching at Lawrenceville School and the University of Chicago long after he became famous. Most traditional...
...captain in Air Forces Intelligence since last June, Wilder got his first stage look at The Skin of Our Teeth at a preview two days before it opened...