Word: wilder
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Princesses. At the Thacher School, Thornton wrote a play called The Russian Princess-An Extravaganza!, covered his first-year algebra book with the tables of contents for imaginary books ("Quadratics in those days could be supported only with the help of a rich marginal commentary"). By that time, Mr. Wilder had decided that Thornton should spend his summers working on a farm. Thornton worked-after his fashion. He fed the pigs, dreamily pitched the hay, declaimed "to the cows in the stanchions the judge's speech from Barrie's The Legend of Leonora...
When the time came for college, Mr. Wilder decided that Yale, his own alma mater, was too worldly for his boys, so Amos and Thornton went to Oberlin.There Thornton fell under the spell of a great teacher. Professor Charles Wager was a kindly, quiet man who described himself as an "umbratile nature" (one who lives in the shadows of great men); but when he spoke of Victorian literature, or carried his students on the tide of his enthusiasm from Homer to Dante, the shadows vanished. From Wager, Thornton learned a lesson he was never to forget: "Every great work...
...joined the Elizabethan Club, quoted Goethe with Sophomore Robert Hutchins. Thornton's room became a salon, where he would read his plays aloud or hold forth on the gloomy beauties of George Gissing. Professor William Lyon Phelps exclaimed: "I believe he is a genius." Mr. Wilder demurred: "Oh, tut-tut-tut, Billy, you're puffing my boy up way beyond his parts...
After Yale Thornton needed a job, and teaching seemed to be about all he was good for. Mr. Wilder decided he should go to the American Academy in Rome, where he could improve his Latin by studying archaeology. For nine months, Thornton basked in Rome. Then a cable from his father called him home: "HAVE JOB FOR YOU TEACHING NEXT YEAR LAWRENCEVILLE. LEARN FRENCH." Thornton hastily set about learning to teach...
Greatest Profession. One autumn day in 1921, "expecting to be met by the headmaster demanding the past participles of French verbs," Thornton arrived on the oak-studded campus near Trenton, N.J. There, for six years, while his expatriate contemporaries were scribbling and scrounging on the Left Bank, Wilder nursed and nudged a generation of Lawrenceville boys. "I am the only American of my generation," says he, "who did not go to Paris...