Word: wildering
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Then they knew that "Mr. Wilder is writing." During his months in Rome, he had filled dozens of blankbooks with notes for a series of character sketches. By 1926 he had finished his first novel, The Cabala...
Pieces of Ivory. The book was a critical success. It was a mannered, exotic tale about a circle of aristocrats "so powerful and exclusive that . . . Romans refer to them with bated breath." ("Tell Mr. Wilder," said one of the high-born ladies with some amusement, "that we are not really so interesting.") The book was a precocious effort of a precocious young man, groping for something as yet beyond his powers. He hinted that his characters were ancient gods in modern dress, and that one minor figure was a portrait of Keats. In effect, Wilder had bundled Rome...
...magnitude!" cried Billy Phelps. "The stuff of genius!" echoed William Rose Benét. The Bridge won the Pulitzer Prize, sold 300,000 copies in a year, was translated into French, German and three other languages. In Peru, tourist guides managed to find a site for the Abridge that Wilder had invented...
...strength of his success, Wilder resigned 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...
Invitation to Wander. There, while she rocked back & forth in her chair with her little dog Lolo in her lap, Gertrude Stein talked and talked. She talked, among other things, about America. As Wilder listened, all his lessons-the digging at Rome, Wager's "Every great work was written this morning"-fell into place. Gertrude Stein made a distinction between human nature and the human mind. Human nature, she said, clings to identity, to location in time and place. The human mind has no identity; it gazes at pure existing and pure creating, and "it knows what it knows...