Word: wildering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Playwright Wilder is equally cavalier about the eternal verities. The Skin of Our Teeth is like a philosophy class conducted in a monkey house. In showing how man through the ages has escaped destruction by the skin of his teeth, the play tweaks his nose, barks his shins, musses his hair, gives him the hotfoot. It tweaks its own nose too: the philosopher implies he may be a monkey himself...
Already a center of controversy, Wilder's jumbled resume of man's history should mystify only those who worry their heads over hidden meanings instead of adjusting their imaginations to spectacular stagecraft. Perfectly clear, too, is Wilder's optimistic conclusion that mankind, for all its bad luck and narrow escapes, is indestructible...
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...