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    Study Guide to Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder
    Study Guide to Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder
    Study Guide to Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder
    Ebook182 pages2 hours

    Study Guide to Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder

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    About this ebook

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInfluence Publishers
    Release dateJul 16, 2020
    ISBN9781645425076
    Study Guide to Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder
    Author

    Intelligent Education

    Intelligent Education is a learning company with a mission to publish accessible resources and digital tools to educate the world. Their mission drives every project, from publishing books to designing software and online courses, film projects, mobile apps, VR/AR learning tools and more. IE builds tools to empower people who love to learn. Intelligent Education offers courses in science, mathematics, the arts, humanities, history and language arts taught by leading university professors from Wake Forest University, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, and other great schools. The learning platform features 3D models and 360 media paired with instructional videos for on-screen and Mixed Reality interaction that increases student engagement and improves retention. The IE team is geographically located across the United States and is a division of Academic Influence. Learn more at http://intelligent.education.

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      Study Guide to Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder - Intelligent Education

      THORNTON WILDER

      INTRODUCTION

      Thornton Niven Wilder is one of America’s most respected contemporary authors. His writing has been far from prolific, but what he has published is a fresh interpretation of age-old themes, presented in a modern idiom and a concise prose style. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, notably Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos, he is like the man in Rudyard Kipling’s If - he kept his head while those around him were losing theirs, especially during the decade when they were all literary apprentices and the center of American literary life was in Paris. Today Wilder lives in Hamden, Connecticut, where he is working on his latest drama, The Seven Ages of Man and The Seven Deadly Sins, two cycles of one-act plays. The many honorary degrees and lectureships, three Pulitzer Prizes, a Gold Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the warm reception of his works, particularly The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town, have been well deserved laurels for an artistic career which spans four decades. On May 4, 1965, Thornton Wilder was awarded the first National Medal for Literature at a White House ceremony.

      EARLY LIFE

      Wilder’s father, Amos, earned his doctoral degree in economics at Yale and entered upon a career in journalism. He first edited the Journal in New Haven and then went to Madison, Wisconsin, where he edited the Wisconsin State Journal. It was in Madison that Thornton was born on April 18, 1897. He was given the family names of his mother, Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder. The second of five children, two boys and three girls, Wilder spent the first nine years of his life in Madison. His home life was characterized by a strong religious and intellectual atmosphere which allowed him to read widely, a habit which has been the main influence in his career.

      Because of his support of Theodore Roosevelt, Amos Wilder was appointed American Consul General at Hong Kong and Shanghai. In China, Thornton attended a missionary school at Chefoo. The Wilders returned to America in 1910 and settled in California, where Thornton attended high school at Berkeley and prepared for college at the Thacher School in Ojai, California. It was during this period that the young student became enamored of writing and wrote the three-minute play, The Angel That Troubled the Waters, which was published in 1928.

      COLLEGE DAYS

      Entering Oberlin College in 1915, Wilder studied the classics, and continued to write plays. After two years he transferred to Yale only to leave college the following year to enlist in the Coast Artillery Corps. His older brother, Amos, who was also destined to become a writer and teacher, saw service in the ambulance corps as did Hemingway and Dos Passos. Upon completion of his tour of duty, Wilder returned to Yale to complete his B.A. in 1920.

      In his two years at Yale, Wilder’s main activity was the Yale literary magazine. In addition to writing short stories, plays and reviews, he also composed and played music on the piano. He was described by one of his professors as a quiet, modest, attractive student, alive with literary ambition. He published his first full-length play, The Trumpet Shall Sound, in the lit during his senior year.

      Following graduation Wilder studied archaeology at the American Academy in Rome. He then accepted an appointment as an instructor in French at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Wilder was associated with Lawrenceville from 1921 to 1928. In addition to teaching, he was a housemaster, but still the literary ambitions of his college days allowed him to write forty three-minute plays, earn an M.A. from Princeton, and publish two novels.

      THE WRITER

      The Cabala, published in 1926, was the result of his impressions in Rome several years before. It was dedicated to his friends at the American Academy. In 1927, he published The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which made his famous almost overnight. It was reviewed favorably, sold widely, won a Pulitzer Prize, and gave him enough income to allow him to quit teaching.

      He now entered formally upon a writing and teaching career which has included three additional novels, The Woman of Andros (1930), Heaven’s My Destination (1935), and The Ides of March (1948), and three major plays, Our Town (1935), for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), for which he won his third Pulitzer Prize, and The Matchmaker (1954), which was a revision of an earlier play, The Merchant of Yonkers. The Matchmaker was also made into a motion picture, and, recently, used as the source for the popular Broadway musical, Hello Dolly.

      After leaving Lawrenceville in 1928, Wilder spent two years in Europe studying continental drama. In 1931, he accepted the invitation of Robert Hutchins to become a lecturer at the University of Chicago. He taught for six months of the year and wrote for the other six. Since 1936, he has directed his full efforts, except for The Ides of March (1948), toward the stage.

      During World War II he served with the United States Air Force in North Africa and Italy. Since the war he has continued lecturing at many colleges, universities, and cultural centers in America and abroad.

      SOURCES AND THEMES

      The three principal influences on the writings of Thornton Wilder are his religious background, his love of classicism, and his worldwide travels. The settings of his novels range from Rome of the 1920s in The Cabala to the Rome of Caesar in the Ides of March, from the Greece of pre-Christianity in the Woman of Andros, to the mid-Western American corn belt of Kansas in Heaven’s My Destination, and finally to colonial Peru in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In contrast the settings of his plays are the representative small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire in Our Town, New Jersey in The Skin of Our Teeth, and New York City of the 1880s in The Matchmaker. To Wilder, the proper study of mankind is man. There are set in America and whose characters wear modern dress and speak in modern idiom. Wilder himself has acknowledged his debt to many writers. Part of his artistic credo is the analogy that literature is like a torch race where one writer passes the literary flame of ideas on to another, very much in the fashion of Olympic runners. Among the writers who have influenced his work are the classical masters. Sophocles and Virgil and the more modern authors, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. As a writer, many critics compare him to Henry James.

      His philosophy of writing is not to create something new, but rather to restate the old verities in a clearer and more modern way. His background is easily seen in many of his works by his use of Biblical, classical, and archaeological motifs and allusions. If there is one theme which unites all of his works, it is humanism. To Wilder, the proper study of mankind is man. The two most obvious motifs found in his works are love in all its dimensions and time, the framework within which all men live. Wilder watches a clock of human history and while, as are all men, he is concerned with the present, he nevertheless sees the spectrum of all history and the daily events of the present in archetypal perspective.

      THEORY OF DRAMA

      In Some Thoughts on Playwriting, which appeared in the Intent of the Artist (1941), Wilder presented his theories on drama. Briefly, he said that drama differs from the other arts in four ways:

      First, drama depends on many collaborators - the dramatist, the actors, the director, and the audience. A dramatist should write so as to take advantage of the attributes of an actor. An outstanding actor must first of all be observant, secondly be imaginative, and third have the physical qualifications to play the role.

      Secondly, drama is addressed to the combined mind of an audience. Therefore, the scope of drama must be wide enough to appeal to a majority of the people experiencing it. To capture the audience, the main technique must be action and movement.

      Thirdly, drama is a pretense. It must appeal to the general and imaginative experience of the audience. Therefore, little elaborateness or spectacle is needed.

      Fourthly, Time in a play is always in the present. Unlike the novel which tells what happened, a play tells what is happening.

      Finally, Wilder points to the greatest periods of literary history, in particular The Golden Age of Pericles and The Elizabethan Age, both of which produced the greatest dramas the world has ever known, to show the scope which drama can attain and to indicate why he turned from the writing of novels to the writing of drama.

      Nearly fifteen years later, in A Preface to Three Plays, Wilder commented more directly on why he turned from writing novels to writing plays. Because of their lack of realism, he became disenchanted with the dramatic productions of the late 1920s. Yet he felt that drama was the greatest of all literary forms. Complacency, conformity, and gentility had turned the stage into an unreal place of artificial sprites. Drama needed archetypal dimension, a creation which represented contemporary man as one with all men at all times. The clothes, customs, speeches, and names of men may have changed during two thousand years, but human nature, with its problems and dilemmas, successes and failures, triumphs and tragedies, had not changed. To live was no tragedy, but to live and not to love or not to experience life was the greatest of tragedies.

      HIS DRAMATIC THEORY APPLIED TO OUR TOWN

      Evidence of Wilder’s dramatic theories can be found in all of his plays. Let us expand Our Town within his critical requirements. First, drama must have universal audience appeal. Our Town takes place in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a typical and fictional American small town. The setting is one which would be familiar to almost any American audience. A paperboy, a milkman, a soda jerk, a high school baseball hero, the church organist, and the country doctor are a few of the characters whose faces are familiar to a small American town at the turn of the century. Universality can be seen in the proper names Wilder gave his characters. The principal families in the play are the Webbs and the Gibbs; yet so as not to limit the appeal of Our Town to a white-anglo-saxon-protestant majority Wilder mentions other ethnic and religious groups which go to make up any typical American sociological cross section. And where do these minorities live? Across the tracks, naturally!

      Our Town also fulfills Wilder’s requirements for pretense and time. There are few props: a table and a few chairs, two ladders, and two stools. These props are used for a majority of scenes in the Webb’s and Gibb’s homes. The ladders represent at one point in the play the second floor rooms of George and Emily; they also are used for the two stools at a simulated drugstore counter. At the end of the play the dead sit in two rows of chairs which represent their final resting place.

      The Time is the present in Our Town. The stage manager, as well as the players, tell us what is happening. In chronology, Our Town begins in 1901 and ends in 1913. It covers the three life cycles of love, marriage, and death. It achieves archetypal dimension by the commentary of the stage manager who questions this same cycle in the daily life of a Babylonian George and Emily two thousand years ago. We soon discover that love and marriage and death have been a common experience to all men in all ages, and will probably continue to be so.

      A successful production of Our Town does demand the collaboration of observant, imaginative, and physically gifted

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