Conversations with Thornton Wilder by Jackson R Bryer

Conversations with Thornton Wilder by Jackson R Bryer

Known today primarily as the author of Our Town, probably America's most beloved and widely produced play, Thornton Wilder is the only writer ever to be honored with Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama. This collection of interviews with Wilder covers the full range of his sixty-year career as one of America's leading men of letters. In addition to American interviews, this book includes translations of interviews published originally in French and German that have never appeared in English previously. It includes a transcription of a rare radio interview conducted by Rex Stout and an extensive Paris Review conversation between Wilder and Richard H. Goldston, his first biographer. Throughout this book is a sense of Wilder's boundless curiosity, his wit, his unflagging energy, his friendships with a range of celebrities such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Gene Tunney, and above all, the multitude of subjects on which he conversed easily and brilliantly. Conversations with Thornton Wilder provides a close-up encounter with Wilder as novelist, playwright, actor, director, teacher, scholar, world traveler, musician, raconteur, and friend of the famous. The earliest interview included was given in 1928, when his most acclaimed and commercially successful novel, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, won him his first Pulitzer Prize. From the 1930s and 1940s come Wilder's comments on his two celebrated plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, both Pulitzer winners. In the last three decades of his life, Wilder returned to the novel form (The Eighth Day won the National Book Award) while continuing to write plays and to give his opinions on theater-in-the-round, the hippie movement, movies and television, and Communism.

Jackson R. Bryer, a professor of English at the University of Maryland and cofounder and coeditor of Resources for American Literary Study, is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780878055142
ISBN 10	0878055142
Title	Conversations with Thornton Wilder
Author	Jackson R Bryer
Series	Literary Conversations Series
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University Press of Mississippi
Year published	1992-01-30
Number of pages	156
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.