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Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater

Edited by J. D. McClatchy

“The Library of America earns a standing ovation from grateful theater lovers for its triumphant assemblage of all of Thornton Wilder’s dramatic writings into one magnificent, indispensable volume. Seeing the totality of this great American playwright’s dizzyingly, dazzlingly wide range of work will be especially revelatory for a new generation of playwrights.” — John Guare

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Video Our Town for Our Time: How Thornton Wilder’s Play Speaks to a Changing America and Around the World
August 4, 2022

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

Click here to save $40 when you buy all three LOA Thornton Wilder volumes

Tender, beguiling, suffused with feeling and wit, the remarkable plays of Thornton Wilder occupy a unique place in American culture. His most celebrated play, Our Town, has achieved iconic status as an expression of the spirit and pathos of small-town American life; adapted for the movies and the operatic stage, it continues to resonate with audiences responding to its formal elegance, plainspoken poetry, and moving evocation of the inevitability of loss.

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, beginning with his early expressionist experiments and daring one-act plays such as “The Long Christmas Dinner” and “The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden” (one of Wilder’s personal favorites), ranging through the full flowering of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker, and encompassing the intriguing dramatic projects of his later years, such as his adaptation of the ancient story of Alcestis (The Alcestiad) and plays written for dramatic cycles based on the Seven Deadly Sins and the varied ages of an individual’s life. Complementing the selection of plays is an illuminating group of essays that captures Wilder’s reflections on his plays and contains a revealing epistolary account of the film adaptation of Our Town, as well as evaluations of dramatists such as Sophocles, George Bernard Shaw, and the Austrian satirist Johann Nestroy (whose farce Einen Jux will er sich machen Wilder brilliantly transformed into The Matchmaker).

This volume also includes material never before published: scenes from The Emporium, an ambitious unfinished play that, emerging out of Wilder’s intense engagement with existentialist philosophy in the postwar years, imagines a Kafkaesque department store whose enigmatic activities are as inscrutable as the mysteries of life itself; and the complete screenplay Wilder wrote for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt just before reporting for military service in 1942. Although faithful to the spirit of the film, the screenplay presented here restores Wilder’s original dialogue, some of which (to Wilder’s dismay) was altered for the movie. A study of family life, youthful illusions, and the desperation of a criminal on the run, the Shadow of a Doubt screenplay is a masterful exhibition of the art of suspense and taut dramatic storytelling, and is an essential part of Wilder’s oeuvre.

“While all of Wilder’s work is intelligent, non-synthetic and often moving, as well as funny, it is Our Town that makes the difference. It is probably the finest play ever written by an American.”—Edward Albee

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.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater is kept in print by a gift from the Sidney J. Weinberg Jr. Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Video Our Town for Our Time: How Thornton Wilder’s Play Speaks to a Changing America and Around the World
August 4, 2022

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
Table of Contents

The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays
Nascuntur Poetae
Proserpina and the Devil
Fanny Otcott
Brother Fire
The Penny That Beauty Spent
The Angel on the Ship
The Message and Jehanne
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
Centaurs
Leviathan
And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead
The Servant’s Name Was Malchus
Mozart and the Gray Steward
Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job?
The Flight Into Egypt
The Angel That Troubled the Waters

The Long Christmas Dinner & Other Plays In One Act
The Long Christmas Dinner
Queens of France
Pullman Car Hiawatha
Love and How to Cure It
Such Things Only Happen in Books
The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden

Our Town

The Skin Of Our Teeth

The Matchmaker

The Alcestiad

The Drunken Sisters

Uncollected Plays
The Marriage We Deplore
The Unerring Instinct
Scenes from The Emporium
Plays for Bleecker Street
The Seven Deadly Sins
Bernice
The Wreck of the Five-Twenty-Five
A Ringing of Doorbells
In Shakespeare and the Bible
Someone from Assisi
Cement Hands
The Seven Ages of Man:
Infancy
Childhood
Youth
The Rivers Under the Earth

Writings on Theater
Foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays
Notes for the Producer: The Long Christmas Dinner
Notes for the Producer: The Happy Journey
A Preface for Our Town
Our Town: Story of the Play
Our Town: Some Suggestions for the Director
Our Town—From Stage to Screen: A correspondence between Thornton Wilder and Sol Lesser
Preface to Three Plays
Notes on The Alcestiad
Noting the Nature of Farce
Some Thoughts on Playwriting
Richard Beer-Hofmann’s Jaakobs Traum
Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex
Foreword to Three Comedies by Johann Nestroy

Shadow Of A Doubt

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-003-2 888 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 172 Library of America Series

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