WRITER

Thornton Wilder

1897 - 1975

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist (and occasional actor in his own plays.) He won three Pulitzer Prizes, for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a U.S. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Thornton Wilder has received more than 1,079,612 page views. His biography is available in 46 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 42 in 2019). Thornton Wilder is the 1,360th most popular writer (up from 1,377th in 2019), the 1,665th most popular biography from United States (up from 1,756th in 2019) and the 150th most popular American Writer.

Memorability Metrics

1.1M
Page Views (PV)
59.32
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
46
Languages Editions (L)
4.82
Effective Languages (L*)
4.28
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

The Ides of March

Murder, Fiction, Romans, nouvelles

*The Ides of March*, first published in 1948, is a brilliant epistolary novel set in Julius Caesar's Rome. Thornton Wilder called it "a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic." Through vividly imagined letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of history's most magnetic, elusive personalities. In this inventive narrative, the Caesar of history becomes Caesar the human being. Wilder also resurrects the controversial figures surrounding Caesar -- Cleopatra, Catullus, Cicero, and others. All Rome comes crowding through these pages -- the Rome of villas and slums, beautiful women and brawling youths, spies and assassins.

1948

Our town

Death, Scripts, Drama

Thornton Wilder contemplates ordinary life events (birth, family life, marriage, and death), mostly through one character, a young woman, Emily Webb, who leads an unexamined life until she encounters death.

1938

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Accident victims, Accidents, American fiction

*The Bridge of San Luis Rey* (1927) tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them. Philosophically, the book explores the problem of evil, or the question, of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem "innocent" or "undeserving". It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and in 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. The book was quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Since then its popularity has grown enormously. The book is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events before the disaster.

1927

The cabala

American Authors, Fiction

1926

Heaven's my destination

Fiction, Depressions, Publishing

1934

Three plays

Drama, Fiction, History

1955