Word: isabel
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...wasn't enough to produce the rounded picture of Wilder that Barton needed to write his cover story. In addition to interviews with a number of the writer's other friends and early associates, Barton and Researcher Marjorie Burns spent a day with Wilder's sister Isabel at her home in New Haven...
There, in an interview punctuated by frequent trips to supervise plumbers who were installing a new dishwasher, Miss Wilder was extremely helpful in providing incidents from her brother's early life. Barton noticed that, for a writer, there were few books around the house, wondered about it aloud. Isabel explained that Wilder gave books away all the time, and that she could "barely hang on to copies of books written by members of the family"-a small library in itself, including three novels by Isabel. Giving away books seemed to be a family weakness; Researcher Burns was given...
Thornton was the second of five children, and his father had anxious plans for each of them. Amos, the eldest, was to be a minister (he is now professor of New Testament at Chicago); Charlotte a doctor (she became a professor and poet) ; Isabel a nurse (she became a novelist); and Janet a scientist (she gave up zoology for marriage). When it came to Thornton, father Wilder had little hope: "Poor Thornton, poor Thornton," he would say, "he'll be a burden all his life...
...from Lawrenceville and wrote a third novel. The Woman of Andros, inspired by a play of Terence, was equally polished,* and it, too, was a success. As the royalties poured in, Wilder built his parents a house in New Haven ("the house the Bridge built"), and took his sister Isabel off to Europe. He dined with Arnold Bennett, heard G. B. Shaw lecture Mrs. Hardy on the merits of vegetarianism ("In the next room, my wife will lay before you the decaying carcasses of animals"). He went to Berlin, attended the theater almost every night, continued a project of reading...
...Wilder seems determined to get acquainted with as much of that population as he can. Between restless peregrinations, he settles for brief periods in the "house the Bridge built" in New Haven. It is a simple, sunlit house, perched on top of a hill; Wilder's sister Isabel keeps house. When he is there, he usually gets up at 7 ("The bell of Lawrenceville still rings in my head") and goes out for breakfast - sometimes to the railroad station, a three-mile walk. He eats whatever he feels like eating. "What did you have for lunch?" Woollcott once asked...