The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder | 
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| Authors: Thornton Wilder, Jackson R. Bryer, Robin Gibbs Wilder
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $29.96 (75%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 419703
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 768
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.4 x 1.8
ISBN: 0060765070
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5203
EAN: 9780060765071
ASIN: 0060765070
Publication Date: October 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
pThis volume of more than three hundred letters, selected from some seven thousand gathered around the world, is the first to provide a comprehensive collection of Thornton Wilder's correspondence. Wilder was known as a man who knew everybody, and these letters vividly document the range of his friendships. Readers will find him roller-skating with Walt Disney, attending an inaugural reception for FDR at the White House, describing his life as a soldier in two World Wars, mentoring younger writers, dining out with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, and savoring his association with colorful local citizens during his twenty-month stay as a self-styled #147;hermit#148; in an Arizona mining town./p pThrough Wilder's correspondence, readers can eavesdrop on his conversations with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein. Nol Coward, Max Reinhardt, Gene Tunney, Alexander Woollcott, Laurence Olivier, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, Aaron Copeland, Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, and Mia Farrow. Equally absorbing are Wilder's intimate letters to his family. /p pThe author of such classics as iOur Town/i and iThe Bridge of San Luis Rey/i, Wilder was a born storyteller and dramatist; we see that talent emerging in scenes and incidental dialogue in his letters. With characteristic exuberance, he draws on his vast reservoir of learning and his incessant reading to inform, encourage, instruct, and entertain. In this collection, Thornton Wilder speaks for himself in his own unique, enduring voice./p
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| Customer Reviews:
Not really a great letter writer January 5, 2009
Wilder is not one of the great letter writers , though he must have been an admirable correspondent, and late in life he lashes out at a would-be biographer whose take on him was going to be that Wilder led a lonely life, by responding with a list of great friends. I had 400 letters from Ruth Gordon, he cries out. Sometimes it feels as though all 400 were in this book.br /br /I yield to no one in my admiration for Thornton Wilder's plays, and I believe that the Library of America Wilder is the best book of plays they will ever publish. So I ran to this book to find out more about the dramatist, and maybe that was the wrong approach, because there isn't very much there, particularly about the 2 series of seven one-act plays that, late in life, turned out to be his finest achievement. (It is interesting to discover that BERNICE turns out to have been built up out of the failed plans to write a screenplay for Italian neo-realist Vittorio de Sica.) Wilder is usually charming and warm in his letters, but I got tired of reading, say, 1 letter to G.D. or 1 letter to Hemingway, and then have to put up with six or seven letters to his family no more revealing or intriguing than his letters to anyone else. Right now I'm so tired of Amos, Isabel, and Isabella! Even Wilder's "high society" letters are more interesting, at least he's giving and apparently getting some good gossip, but it's a little dispiriting how he just loves him his rich people, always ready to provide Lady Sibyl Colefax with some anecdotes of the po' folk he lives among in the US for her amusement.br /br /Still there is plenty to admire. His writing life, for all his social whirlwind, is a heroic one, and his actual taste is a marvel of discernment that holds up admirably today (okay, if Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin aren't your idea of great artists, you'll admit he was right about hundreds of others). What strikes me this week is how well he would have fit right in with today's vogue for multicultural, multilingual literature: he was versed in French, Italian, Spanish, German writing and art, and intimately familiar with the latest developments in each, and he sought actively to cross-fertilize the cultural patterns of each nation he visited, in the name of a greater understanding and appreciation. He is always recommending something recherche to someone in a position to do something about it. (His work in helping to place those forced out of Hitler's Germany due to ideology and religion is an inspiration, and maybe you had to be a social butterfly to get so much done in this line, I can't say.) We don't find out much about his emotional life, his lovelife, so maybe there was nothing going on in that department. This zero became the lack around which the rest of his life was organized; no wonder he just doted on those, like Mia Farrow, for whom need and the primal, sex and the affective, was everything,br /br /Another thing I liked about him was his occasional getting down on the young writers and artists who came to him for help. He wasn't just flattering and gooey with them, no, he was fairly strict with them and told them exactly what he thought, in terms that must have come as a shock to the aspiring writers (Edward Albee, Marcia Nardi for example), but maybe did them some good?br /br /And yes, there are some lovely stories here... His meeting with Freud, his late-in-life encounter with Djuna Barnes (negative about every topic he begins), the story of being summoned by Mary Pickford who wants to co-write a play with him about two Chinese sisters....
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