The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder Page A
Authors: Thornton Wilder
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the helmsman suffered the downpour, and on the high pastures the shepherd turned and drew his cloak closer about him. In the hills the long-dried stream-beds began to fill again and the noise of water falling from level to level, warring with the stones in the way, filled the gorges. But behind the thick beds of clouds the moon soared radiantly bright, shining upon Italy and its smoking mountains. And in the East the stars shone tranquilly down upon the land that was soon to be called Holy and that even then was preparing its precious burden.
A FTERWORD
We don’t at the moment know the date of publication, but a new book by Wilder is a genuine literary event.
– ‘The Phoenix Nest,’ Bookman, September 7, 1929
Mr. Wilder has said somewhere that all his books have been studies of how men and women meet their fates.
– Henry Seidel Canby, Saturday Review of Literature,
March 1, 1930
T hornton Wilder conceived the idea for The Woman of Andros at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in the spring of 1928 in the midst of a literary explosion titled The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The fallout from this event would determine how and where Andros would be written, designed, and marketed by its publisher, Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., and would help to shape its reception by critics and the public. It would also give Wilder leverage for publishing drama, his other literary passion.
Before The Bridge of San Luis Rey transformed his life, Wilder had taught and served as a dormitory master at Lawrenceville School from 1921 to 1925, before departing on a two year leave of absence to complete The Cabala and take a graduate degree at Princeton University. Because he did not earn enough royalties from his first novel to stake himself for at least another year of writing or to persuade his publisher to underwrite such a program, he returned to teach at the school in the fall of 1927, three months before The Bridge was published. By the end of 1928, sales of The Bridge had reached more than 300,000 copies in the United States and England. After one of the most celebrated debuts in twentieth-century American literature, Wilder found himself the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the toast of the English-speaking world, and a wealthy man.
The stunned author also found his stunned publisher at his side reminding him of a significant new fact in his life: now that Wilder was an author with an enormous following, it was his obligation to write the next novel as quickly as possible. The man who had written The Bridge of San Luis Rey appeared to see his duty. In February 1928, amid the madness of trying to teach; run a dormitory; and handle the phone calls, correspondence, and visits generated by his newfound fame, Wilder informed Boni that the next novel would be entitled The Woman of Andros. He apparently described it with no more detail than he gave his mother in a brief and harried note: ‘The Woman of Andros – after play by Terence – Aegean island. Paganism with premonitions of Xianty.’
Andros would be Wilder’s next work of fiction, but not his next book. In October 1928, the recently established New York publisher Coward-McCann published a modest trade edition of 2,000 copies of The Angel That Troubled the Waters, Wilder’s first book of drama. It contained sixteen three-minute playlets, the dramatic form Wilder had practiced passionately since high school. All but four of these short short plays were written or published before 1926.
This detour into publishing drama was no surprise to his publishers, and they were not happy about it. Soon after The Cabala appeared in 1926, Wilder had approached Boni about publishing his playlets. Prospecting for the gold to be found in fiction, Boni had no interest in throwing away a contractual claim to one of the author’s next two books on a mere book of drama, goldplate at best. In April 1927, therefore, they gave Wilder permission to publish his playlets elsewhere ‘in
A FTERWORD
We don’t at the moment know the date of publication, but a new book by Wilder is a genuine literary event.
– ‘The Phoenix Nest,’ Bookman, September 7, 1929
Mr. Wilder has said somewhere that all his books have been studies of how men and women meet their fates.
– Henry Seidel Canby, Saturday Review of Literature,
March 1, 1930
T hornton Wilder conceived the idea for The Woman of Andros at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in the spring of 1928 in the midst of a literary explosion titled The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The fallout from this event would determine how and where Andros would be written, designed, and marketed by its publisher, Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., and would help to shape its reception by critics and the public. It would also give Wilder leverage for publishing drama, his other literary passion.
Before The Bridge of San Luis Rey transformed his life, Wilder had taught and served as a dormitory master at Lawrenceville School from 1921 to 1925, before departing on a two year leave of absence to complete The Cabala and take a graduate degree at Princeton University. Because he did not earn enough royalties from his first novel to stake himself for at least another year of writing or to persuade his publisher to underwrite such a program, he returned to teach at the school in the fall of 1927, three months before The Bridge was published. By the end of 1928, sales of The Bridge had reached more than 300,000 copies in the United States and England. After one of the most celebrated debuts in twentieth-century American literature, Wilder found himself the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the toast of the English-speaking world, and a wealthy man.
The stunned author also found his stunned publisher at his side reminding him of a significant new fact in his life: now that Wilder was an author with an enormous following, it was his obligation to write the next novel as quickly as possible. The man who had written The Bridge of San Luis Rey appeared to see his duty. In February 1928, amid the madness of trying to teach; run a dormitory; and handle the phone calls, correspondence, and visits generated by his newfound fame, Wilder informed Boni that the next novel would be entitled The Woman of Andros. He apparently described it with no more detail than he gave his mother in a brief and harried note: ‘The Woman of Andros – after play by Terence – Aegean island. Paganism with premonitions of Xianty.’
Andros would be Wilder’s next work of fiction, but not his next book. In October 1928, the recently established New York publisher Coward-McCann published a modest trade edition of 2,000 copies of The Angel That Troubled the Waters, Wilder’s first book of drama. It contained sixteen three-minute playlets, the dramatic form Wilder had practiced passionately since high school. All but four of these short short plays were written or published before 1926.
This detour into publishing drama was no surprise to his publishers, and they were not happy about it. Soon after The Cabala appeared in 1926, Wilder had approached Boni about publishing his playlets. Prospecting for the gold to be found in fiction, Boni had no interest in throwing away a contractual claim to one of the author’s next two books on a mere book of drama, goldplate at best. In April 1927, therefore, they gave Wilder permission to publish his playlets elsewhere ‘in
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