Books January 1984
The skin of his teeth
A review of The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder by Gilbert A. Harrison.
I cannot believe that the reputation of Thornton Wilder, either as a novelist or as a playwright, has not suffered a greater diminution than Gilbert Harrison has implied by writing Wilder’s biography.[1] We should be grateful that he has done so. There is no necessary connection between the rank of a writer’s professional achievement and the interest attaching to his day-by-day existence. Harrison has given Wilder’s life a unique interest simply by organizing its sequences with copious documentation, notably from Wilder’s personal correspondence. As a result, Harrison has uncovered, very far from his intention, I’m sure, a dumbfoundingly consistent history of self-concealment.
Those who think of Wilder as principally the author of that bare-stage, bare-language attempt to find big meanings in limited...
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