Conversations with Thornton Wilder

Conversations with Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878055142
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town

Conversations with Thornton Wilder

Conversations with Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878055142
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Penelope Niven
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062097776
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 791

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Book Description
"Thornton Wilder: A Life brings readers face to face with the extraordinary man who made words come alive around the world, on the stage and on the page." —James Earl Jones, actor "Comprehensive and wisely fashioned….A splendid and long needed work." —Edward Albee, playwright Thornton Wilder—three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, creator of such enduring stage works as Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and beloved novels like Bridge of San Luis Ray and Theophilus North—was much more than a pivotal figure in twentieth century American theater and literature. He was a world-traveler, a student, a teacher, a soldier, an actor, a son, a brother, and a complex, intensely private man who kept his personal life a secret. In Thornton Wilder: A Life, author Penelope Niven pulls back the curtain to present a fascinating, three-dimensional portrait one of America's greatest playwrights, novelists, and literary icons.

Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature

Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature PDF Author: Stephen J. Rojcewicz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032014678
Category : Classical literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"This book delineates how Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), a learned playwright and novelist, embeds himself within the classical tradition, integrating Greek and Roman motifs with a wide range of sources to produce heart-breaking masterpieces such as Our Town and comedy sensations such as Dolly Levi. Through this study of archival sources and close reading, readers will understand Wilder's avant-garde staging and innovative time sequences not as a break with the past, but as a response to the classics. The author traces the genesis of unforgettable characters like Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker, Emily Webb in Our Town, and George Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth. Vergil's expression, "Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart" haunts Wilder's oeuvre. Understanding Vergil's phrase as "tears for the beauty of the world," Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the beauty of the world and the sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly, alert to the wonder of the everyday. This work will appeal to actors and directors, professors and students in Classics and in American literature, those fascinated by modern drama and performance studies, and non-specialists, theatre-goers, and readers in the general public"--

Theophilus North

Theophilus North PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062943367
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
“An extremely entertaining array of American life in a bygone era.” — New Yorker The last of Thornton Wilder’s works published during his lifetime, Theophilus North is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventures of Wilder’s twin brother who died at birth. This edition features an updated afterword from Wilder’s nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating material about the novelist, story and setting. Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade. Soon the young man finds himself playing the roles of tutor, tennis coach, spy, confidant, lover, friend and enemy as he becomes entangled in adventure and intrigue in Newport’s fabulous addresses, as well as in its local boarding houses, restaurants, dives and military barracks. Narrated by the elderly North from a distance of fifty years, Theophilus North is a fascinating commentary on youth and education from the vantage point of age, and deftly displays Wilder’s trademark wit juxtaposed with his lively and timeless ruminations on what really matters, at the end of the day, about life, love, and work.

Another Day's Begun

Another Day's Begun PDF Author: Howard Sherman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350123463
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
A work of startling originality when it debuted in 1938, Thornton Wilder's Our Town evolved to be seen by some as a vintage slice of early 20th Century Americana, rather than being fully appreciated for its complex and eternal themes and its deceptively simple form. This unique and timely book shines a light on the play's continued impact in the 21st century and makes a case for the healing powers of Wilder's text to a world confronting multiple crises. Through extensive interviews with more than 100 artists about their own experience of the play and its impact on them professionally and personally – and including background on the play's early years and its pervasiveness in American culture – Another Day's Begun shows why this particular work remains so important, essential, and beloved. Every production of Our Town has a story to tell beyond Wilder's own. One year after the tragedy of 9/11, Paul Newman, in his final stage appearance, played the Stage Manager in Our Town on Broadway. Director David Cromer's 2008 Chicago interpretation would play in five more cities, ultimately becoming New York's longest-running Our Town ever. In 2013, incarcerated men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility brought Grover's Corners inside a maximum security prison. After the 2017 arena bombing in Manchester UK, the Royal Exchange Theatre chose Our Town as its offering to the stricken community. 80 years after it was written, more than 110 years after its actions take place, Our Town continues to assert itself as an essential play about how we must embrace and appreciate the value of life itself. Another Day's Begun explains how this American classic has the power to inspire, heal and endure in the modern day, onstage and beyond.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593470958
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 103

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Book Description
This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novel—by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth—has been beloved around the world for nearly a century. This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individuals—a noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a child—come to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined lives—snuffed out in one shattering moment—illuminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.

Conversations with August Wilson

Conversations with August Wilson PDF Author: Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781578068302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"-- the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards--Publisher description.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman

Conversations with Lillian Hellman PDF Author: Lillian Hellman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878052936
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Twenty-six interviews with the outspoken writer range over six decades of her life and career.

The Skin of Our Teeth

The Skin of Our Teeth PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573615481
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
"An Eternal Family narrowly escape one disaster after another, from ancient times to the present. Meet George and Maggie Antrobus (married only 5,000 years); their two children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in every way!); and their maid, Sabina (the ageless vamp) as they overcome ice, flood, and war -- by the skin of their teeth."--Amazon

The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder

The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Theatre Communications Grou
ISBN: 9781559361316
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Volume One of the collected short plays by one of the greatest American playwrights of the Twentieth Century.