Thornton Wilder Read Free

Row, 1979). © 1979 Wilder Family LLC.
    Selected entries from Wilder’s journals are published in Donald A. Gallup, ed., The Journals of Thornton Wilder 1939–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). © 1985 Wilder Family LLC.
    TNW’s surviving early journals (from 1912, 1916–17, and 1922–33) are unpublished, and while the entries in these journals are usually dated, they are not numbered until October 11, 1926. There are a few 1969 journal entries, also unpublished. Quoted or cited journal entries in the later years follow Gallup’s designations: “The 1939–1941 Journal” and “The 1948–1961 Journal,” but many of these entries are not included in the published volume.
    Wilder’s selected letters appear in the following editions:
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    Edward M. Burns with Joshua A. Gaylord, eds., A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen ( Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001).
    Ulla Dydo and Edward M. Burns, with William Rice, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
    Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Copyright © 2008 Wilder Family LLC. (Compilation of the letters and added text copyright © Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, eds.)
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    Previous full-length biographies of Wilder include:
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    Richard H. Goldstone, Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).
    Gilbert Harrison, The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1983).
    Linda Simon, Thornton Wilder: His World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).
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    Book-length Wilder bibliographies include:
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    Richard H. Goldstone and Gary Anderson, Thornton Wilder: An Annotated Bibliography of Works by and About Thornton Wilder (New York: AMS Press, 1982).
    Claudette Walsh, Thornton Wilder: A Reference Guide, 1926–1990 (New York: G.K. Hall, 1993).
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    Many of the papers of Amos Niven Wilder, Charlotte Wilder, Isabel Wilder, and Janet Wilder Dakin are deposited with the Thornton Niven Wilder Collection at Yale. As of this writing, however, mystery surrounds the fate of some of Charlotte’s papers. In the year after Thornton’s death, it fell to Isabel to deal with twenty years’ accrual of Charlotte’s papers in the “dust-covered, untidy, hastily packed cartons” stored in the attic of the house on Deepwood Drive. As Isabel wrestled with the boxes in the attic, pages fell out. Notebooks opened. In glancing at the pages, Isabel wrote, she came across “startling words,” painful words. There were, she estimated, hundreds if not thousands of pages of prose—fiction and nonfiction—most likely Charlotte’s unfinished memoir and her autobiographical novel. Letters over the next few years trace the movement of Charlotte’s manuscripts from Isabel to Amos to Janet and back again. The manuscripts themselves have not been found. No records have been uncovered to document their ultimate disposition, nor can family memories shed light, and the search continues. Among Charlotte’s surviving papers, however, are many pages with poems typed on one side and fragments of prose on the reverse, as sadly incomplete and incoherent as Charlotte’s life itself.
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    THE THREE earlier biographies listed above were written without access to all of the resources now housed at the Beinecke Library or in other collections, public and private. Now that Thornton Wilder’s papers are more fully available, rich opportunities for research await students and scholars who are interested in American literary, theater, cultural, and social history in general, or in Wilder’s plays, novels, lectures, essays, translations, adaptations, and/or journals in particular.
    For further exploration of Wilder resources, readers are