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Thornton Wilder: Complete Novels, Collected Plays, & Other Writings (three volumes)

Edited by J. D. McClatchy

“Wilder is a novelist of morals. . . . They are answers found by individuals to the old problems of faith, hope, charity or love, art, duty, submission to one’s fate . . . and hence they are relatively universal; they can be illustrated from the lives of any individuals, in any place, at any time since the beginning of time. . . . The characters in Wilder’s novels and plays are looking for such answers.” — Malcolm Cowley

Overview
News & Views

Overview

News Our Town: A play about the ways we remember and misremember the past
April 14, 2022

Story of the Week Thornton Wilder, “Eddy Greater”
April 14, 2022

News “A foretaste of heaven”: Thornton Wilder’s childhood in China
April 14, 2022

Thornton Wilder was the rare writer whose achievements as a playwright were matched by equal abilities as a novelist. The Library of America’s three-volume edition brings together all seven of his novels, more than two dozen plays, his unpublished autobiographical writings, and a selection of stories and essays.

Collected Plays & Writings on Theater, the most comprehensive one-volume edition of Thornton Wilder’s work ever published, takes the measure of his extraordinary career as a dramatist by presenting the complete span of his achievement. Included are his most famous plays—Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker—along with two dozen one-acts and the intriguing dramatic projects of his later years, such as his adaptation of the ancient story of Alcestis (The Alcestiad). This volume also includes the complete screenplay Wilder wrote for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt, presented here with the original dialogue. Complementing the selection of plays is an illuminating group of essays that captures Wilder’s reflections on his plays.

Wilder’s seven novels are collected in the other two volumes in this set. The Cabala fashions a tale of youthful enchantment with Rome in the form of a fictitious memoir of an American student and the enigmatic coterie of noble residents who draw him into their midst. He followed this debut novel two years later with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which catapulted him to literary prominence and earned him the first of his three Pulitzer prizes. Set in 18th-century Peru, the book is a kind of theological detective story concerning a friar’s investigations into the lives of five individuals before they were killed in a bridge collapse. The Woman of Andros, based on the Andria of Roman writer Terence, is a consideration of the ancient world filtered through the sensibility of a meditative courtesan. Heaven’s My Destination, a departure from Wilder’s historical themes, is a picaresque romp through Depression-era America. The Ides of March takes up the story of Julius Caesar’s assassination by imagining the exchange of letters among such prominent ancient figures as Catullus, Cleopatra, Cicero, and Caesar himself.

The final phase of Thornton Wilder’s illustrious career was marked by a triumphant return to the novel after twenty years. The National Book Award–winning The Eighth Day is an epic tale, at once expansive and nuanced, of two American families and their intertwined destinies. John Ashley, a mining engineer in Coaltown, Illinois, is sentenced to death for the murder of his colleague Breckenridge Lansing, but just hours before his execution, a strange and audacious raid sets him free. Couched in a lighter vein, Theophilus North shows Wilder taking a wry backward glance at his youthful self to fashion a “joking autobiography.” A series of loosely connected tales bound by place and mood, Theophilus North is an enchanting work of mischievous wit and elegantly comic storytelling, suffused with fondness for the recollected charms of Newport and its “nine cities.”

J. D. McClatchy (1945–2018) was the author of many books of poetry and essays, including Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems (2014), and the editor of nine Library of America publications. He wrote the libretto for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of Our Town, taught at Yale University, and served as editor of The Yale Review.
News & Views

News Our Town: A play about the ways we remember and misremember the past
April 14, 2022

Story of the Week Thornton Wilder, “Eddy Greater”
April 14, 2022

News “A foretaste of heaven”: Thornton Wilder’s childhood in China
April 14, 2022

News Penelope Niven on Thornton Wilder, reading
April 13, 2022

Interviews Thornton Wilder’s novels: “exceptionally wise” excursions into motive and desire
April 13, 2022

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2407 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

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Thornton Wilder: Complete Novels, Collected Plays, & Other Writings (three volumes)

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