The Rediscoverer

Thornton Wilder was a member of the Lost Generation who was never lost, and his own generation never quite forgave him for that. Born a year after Fitzgerald, two years before Hemingway, he confessed to being "fundamentally a happy person." While his disillusioned contemporaries were rebelling brilliantly as expatriates in Paris, Wilder, whose grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, sometimes plotted out his writing during church services, taught contentedly at a New Jersey prep school (Lawrenceville) and ended up a lifelong bachelor sharing a house with his sister Isabel in Hamden, Conn. Rotund, kind and twinkly to the point of Dickensian caricature, he was, as he pointed out, the sort of man whom "news vendors in university towns call 'Professor,' and hotel clerks, 'Doctor.' "

Daredevil Risks. His talent won Wilder three Pulitzer Prizes for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Key (1927) and for his plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). But his gifts--the polished style, the scholarly allusions, the slightly didactic plots with an elegant touch of mysticism--were viewed in critical circles as relics of the genteel tradition. His optimism ("He says nice things whenever possible," one acquaintance complained) was regarded as a threat to his integrity.

Wilder accepted even criticism cheerfully. In a period dominated by Ezra Pound's fierce injunction, "Make it new!" he admitted: "I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods." Many of his works were in one way or another derivative. The Skin of Our Teeth was born of Finnegans Wake. The Merchant of Yonkers (1938) evolved from a 19th century Viennese farce and developed into The Matchmaker (1954) and Hello, Dolly!

Wilder knew his limits as few members of the Lost Generation knew theirs. A onetime archaeology student, he took the long view. From Julius Caesar's Rome in his novel The Ides of March to Grover's Corners, N.H., in Our Town, it was "the ocean-like monotony of the generations of men" that fascinated him. He had a Roman mind and an American heart. He saw "the absurdity of any single person's claim to the importance of his saying, 'I love!' 'I suffer!' " But his democratic passion was writing about the most ordinary people in love or in pain.

Our Town, despite daredevil risks with the sentimental and the obvious, was his masterpiece. Wilder's death is enough of a loss to produce at least one small question. Who will play the Stage Manager at Grover's Corners, improvising muted trumpet solos over the graves of literature's Unknown Americans?

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