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14 unusual facts about Thornton Wilder


20 Years After

Filmed principally in north Alabama and southern Tennessee, the low-budget film was initially released under the title Like Moles, Like Rats, a reference to the Thornton Wilder play The Skin of Our Teeth.

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake

Campbell and Robinson originally began their unlocking of Joyce's masterwork for two reasons: because Finnegans Wake, while widely recognized as a masterpiece, was also widely dismissed as unintelligible--"the greatest book that nobody's ever read"; and because they had recognized in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), the popular play by Thornton Wilder, an appropriation from Joyce's novel not only of themes but of plot and language as well.

Adeline Glasheen

A Tour of the Darkling Plain, her Joyce letters with Thornton Wilder, and also A Passion for Joyce, her letters with Hugh Kenner.

Chichester Psalms

Interestingly, the boy's theme was adapted from a musical that Bernstein never completed, The Skin of Our Teeth (based on the play by Thornton Wilder).

Harvey Schmidt

Schmidt and Jones wrote a musical of Thornton Wilder's Our Town and it took them thirteen years to write, only to have the rights pulled by Wilder's nephew.

Lauro De Bosis

Thornton Wilder dedicated his novel Ides of March (1948) to him, suggesting a parallel between de Bosis and Catullus.

Love and How to Cure It

Love and How to Cure It is a 1937 British comedy film directed by Royston Morley, based on a story by Thornton Wilder and starring Sara Gregory, Louise Hampton, Edward Chapman and Athene Seyler.

Margaret Kennedy

Of her postwar novels, The Feast (1950) introduces the disaster first and the characters who may or may not have perished in it afterwards, as in Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Mary Ellen Bute

In the 1960s and 1970s Bute worked on two films which were never completed: an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth, and a film about Walt Whitman with the working title Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.

Micaela Villegas

She and the Viceroy are also prominent characters in Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Theatre Tulsa

Unlike many community theaters, Theatre Tulsa managed to remain active during the entire duration of the Depression and even became the first community theater in America to produce Our Town by Thornton Wilder in 1939.

Thornton Wilder

His last novel, Theophilus North, was published in 1973, and made into the film Mr. North in 1988.

In his novel, The Ides of March (1948), dedicated to an anti-fascist Italian writer, Lauro De Bosis, Wilder reflected on parallels between Benito Mussolini and Caesar.

This time the play enjoyed a healthy Broadway run of 486 performances with Ruth Gordon in the title role, winning a Tony Award for Guthrie, its director.


Amerika Haus Berlin

In addition to prestigious scientists, many other famous personalities visited the building, including politicians Ernst Lemme and Willy Brandt, journalists Thilo Koch and Peter von Zahn, composers Darius Milhaud and Alexander Tscherepnine, the actor Sidney Poitier, and the writer Thornton Wilder.

Boy next door

An example of each is found in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in the characters of George Gibbs and Emily Webb.

Charlotte Wilder

Charlotte Wilder (1898–1980) was an American poet and the eldest sister of author Thornton Wilder, Isabel Wilder, Janet Wilder Dakin, and Amos Wilder.

Dezső Kosztolányi

Kosztolányi also produced literary translations in Hungarian, such as (from English, at least) Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", "The Winter's Tale", Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey", Lord Alfred Douglas' memoirs on Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling's "If—".

Doro Merande

Her first major stage role was playing the gossip in Our Town by Thornton Wilder (in which role she made her film debut in 1940 in the film by the same name).

Ellie Lambeti

She successfully starred in theatre productions like Thornton Wilder's Hello, Dolly! in 1980 and in 1981 as Sarah in Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God, but her health was poor.

Girl next door

Both gender examples of the "Next Door" archetype are quintessentially addressed with Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the characters of Emily Webb and George Gibbs or in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer series within the characters of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.

Harper Perennial

Harper Perennial Modern Classics, a direct offshoot of the imprint, publishes eminent authors such as Peter Singer, Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, Aldous Huxley, Russell Banks, Thomas Pynchon, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sylvia Plath, and Thornton Wilder among many others.

Janet Wilder Dakin

Janet Wilder Dakin (June 3, 1910 - October 7, 1994), was a philanthropist, zoologist and a younger sister of author Thornton Wilder and poet Charlotte Wilder.

Johann Nestroy

It was first adapted as Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker (which later became the musical Hello, Dolly!) and later achieved success as the comic masterpiece On the Razzle, which was translated by Stephen Plaice and adapted by Tom Stoppard.

José Quintero

He directed over seventy productions by a great number of writers, including Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, Thornton Wilder, Jean Genet and Brendan Behan.

Key West Heritage House Museum and Robert Frost Cottage

The Heritage House was the gathering place for some of the island's most famous celebrities, such as Robert Frost, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, Gloria Swanson and Sally Rand.

Loring Smith

Smith's most memorable Broadway role came nearly three years later when he portrayed Horace Vandergelder in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, with Ruth Gordon as Dolly, Arthur Hill as Cornelius and Robert Morse as Barnaby.

Morton DaCosta

Born Morton Tecosky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, DaCosta began his career as an actor in the Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth starring Tallulah Bankhead in 1942 .