Word: wilder
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...Flood. After such a quiet play, Wilder's rambunctious The Skin of Our Teeth proved to be a jolt-so much so that some 75 backers promptly backed away. It was a sort of Hellzapoppin with brains, the story of Everyman (Mr. Antrobus) and the whole human race. Its action spread over 5,000 years, took in the Flood, the Ice Age and Armageddon. "Our Town" says Wilder, "is the life of the family seen from a telescope five miles away. The Skin of Our Teeth is the destiny of the whole human group seen from a telescope...
Though one of the things audiences liked about these plays was their refreshing contrast to the orthodox theater, Wilder makes no claims to originality. "My writing life," says he, "is a series of infatuations for admired writers," and he freely acknowledges his debt. He is not a "maker of new modes," but a "renewer of old treasure." Nor does he make any pretense to profundity. All important truths, he insists, lie slumbering inside everyone. A novel or a play is merely the key that springs the lock: "Literature is the orchestration of platitudes." But Orchestrator Wilder was concerned with more...
Hints & Hand Clappings. By the time Wilder arrived in Cambridge, he had served as a combat-intelligence officer with the Air Force in Italy, had recently published a brilliant novel about the Rome of Julius Caesar, The Ides of March. He had also plunged deep into the study of U.S. authors: Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson. Out of these, he formulated his thesis...
Bustle after 5. 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...
...Havenites often see him striding about the town, reciting to himself the paragraphs that will soon be transferred verbatim to his notebooks. Like most authors, Wilder hates to write. Sometimes he plays hooky in the Yale library ("I flip through an archaeological journal and read a piece about a new excavation in Herculaneum. I even read medical journals"). He "does" Finnegan's Wake, pores over Kierkegaard, works at his hobby of dating the plays of Lope de Vega, strums on the piano, or reads a score of a Palestrina Mass. After lunch he usually takes a long nap. After...