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Thornton Wilder

April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975

Inducted in 2013

Plays

The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926)

The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1928)

The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931)

Our Town (1938)—won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

The Merchant of Yonkers (1938)

The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

The Matchmaker (1954)

The Alcestiad: Or, a Life in the Sun (1955)

Childhood (1960)

Infancy (1960)

Plays for Bleecker Street (1962)

The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Volume I (1997)

Films

Mr. North

Shadow of a Doubt

Novels

The Cabala (1926)

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

The Woman of Andros (1930) based on Andria, a comedy by Terence

Heaven's My Destination (1935)

Ides of March (1948)

The Eighth Day (1967)

Theophilus North (1973) 

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Wilder worked as both a novelist and a playwright. Growing up, Wilder was often teased by children his age for being too intellectual. This quirk, however, was a great benefit in his education at Yale and Princeton. In 1930 he began teaching classics and writing at The University of Chicago, a part-time appointment he held for six years. Penelope Niven, who recently published a biography of Wilder, said the writer found the perfect balance of creative, professional and personal balance in Chicago, and loved the city more than all the others he experienced in his lifetime. During this time, Wilder wrote translations, plays, screenplays and began notes for Our Town, for which he would eventually win the Pulitzer Prize. The Skin of Our Teeth also earned him a Pulitzer and his novel The Bridge of San Luis Ray highly lauded. His writing was considered prolific in the exploration of connections between the common human life and the dimensions of human experience.

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