Thornton Wilder: A Life by Penelope Niven (review)

On May 11, 1962, Thornton Wilder attended a White House dinner where he mingled happily with the President and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice-President Johnson, and, among many others, Robert Penn Warren, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Tennessee Williams, Robert Lowell, Isaac Stern, Edmund Wilson, George Balanchine, and Saul Bellow. Nine days later, he climbed into his Thunderbird convertible and headed for the desert southwest. As he reached the top of a hill in Arizona, the car stalled; a sign at the bottom of the hill read “Douglas, Arizona,” and Wilder settled for the next twenty months in that isolated town of about 10,000, where he knew no one and no one knew who he was—“and didn’t care.” Thus did this inveterate world-traveler whose myriad friendships ranged from Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Gene Tunney, Henry Luce, Alfred Hitchcock, and Texas Guinan choose almost two years of solitude, torn as he was—as Penelope Niven aptly puts it, in this detailed and often fascinating biography—between “his need to be with people and his need to be alone.”

This paradox is one of several puzzles presented and illuminated in Niven’s telling of Wilder’s life story. Appropriately she chooses as an epigraph for her book a passage from one of his essays: “art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.” Born in the Midwest of parents who were mismatched in many ways but were both staunch in their Protestant reticence about personal feelings, Wilder retained throughout his long life a hesitancy to share his private thoughts. Niven has approached this difficulty very skillfully by drawing extensively upon the vast trove of Wilder correspondence, journals, and other written materials housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library. She also very adroitly includes many excerpts from letters written to and about Wilder, especially those of his parents and his four siblings; in this biography, Thornton Wilder is considered in the context of his family, and Niven makes a very convincing case that this is the most fruitful way to view him.

Thornton Niven Wilder (very distantly related to the biographer, a fact she discovered only after the book was completed) was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin; a twin, apparently to be named Theophilus, was stillborn. Because Amos Parker Wilder took on diplomatic assignments in China between 1906 and 1914 and because Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder did not share her husband’s love of Asia, the Wilder family only very infrequently were together from shortly after their first trip to Hong Kong in May 1906. In October 1906, after barely six months, Isabella and her four children sailed to San Francisco and settled in Berkeley, where Thornton and his siblings took full advantage of the varied cultural opportunities available in that university community. Isabella, unlike her husband—who did encourage his children to read the literary classics—had a reverence for art in performance; she wrote and translated poetry and encouraged Thornton and his siblings to attend concerts, to take music lessons, and, most significantly in Thornton’s case, to go to plays at the Greek Theatre on the University of California campus. Meanwhile, from afar, Amos Parker Wilder sent weekly long letters to his family and, in return, expected equally frequent reports about his children’s reading (much of it suggested by him) and about their progress in school. He considered his younger son’s interest in drama “an incidental and diversion in life” and urged him not to get “side-tracked by dramatic art or Wagner music.” It was his “daily prayer,” he wrote, “that my children may grow up to be leaders—loving their fellows, free from the little weaknesses that bind men down—fearless total abstinence men and women [he refused to serve alcohol at diplomatic receptions, insisting on...