Thornton Wilder by Penelope Niven Page B

journals, and the generosity of his literary executor, much of Wilder’s story is told here in his own voice.
    In addition to the voluminous record of his later life—the celebrity years—extraordinary records document the first four decades of Wilder’s life and work, the years that are the foundation for all that follows. I have examined those pivotal years with a virtual microscope. I have put a telescope to the nearly four decades that come afterward, a period of flourishing art and life illuminated by the seminal years.
    Among Wilder’s unpublished papers are handwritten reflections on biography, and I have taken them to heart. He wrote, “To BIOGRAPHIZE = means TO WRITE A LIFE = . . . TO BIOGRAPHIZE IN THE HIGHEST SENSE OF THE WORD: TO REVIVIFY. . . .” He went on to say,
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    The most intimate feeling of living
is the perpetual alternation
of hope and dejection
of Plans and Defeat
of Aspiration and Rebuff. 3
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    How to revivify such a life? How to understand the “hope and dejection,” the “Aspiration and Rebuff”? Much of the drama took place in Wilder’s mind and spirit—“the inward life,” he called it. Fortunately he left deeply private revelations of that life in his journals, letters, and manuscripts. Other facets of his life are embedded in his published novels and plays. All told, he left behind countless “signposts, footprints, clues” that can lead us deep within his extraordinary mind and spirit. 4
    He was a refined gypsy, wandering the world, writing, he said, for and about “Everybody”—a fact his audiences around the globe have embraced. Within the circumference of his creative work there stands the person, his private, inward self, sometimes hidden and sometimes revealed in his art and in his papers.
    Thornton Wilder became a man, like the boy in China, running alone, transcending the boundaries, searching for his Gulliver, for his Robinson Crusoe, for himself.

GUIDE TO NOTES AND SOURCES
    Through the facts, as scaffolding, we hope to see the SOUL and we hope thereby to gain light on our own.
    â€”THORNTON WILDER,
    notes for a lecture on biography, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL
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    Thornton Wilder left a mass of unpublished and published letters, manuscripts, journal pages, and other documents—a substantial scaffolding of facts that shape and support a narrative of his life and work. This biography has grown out of more than a decade of close study of these primary sources. In their magnitude they document and illuminate Wilder’s exterior life and much of his interior life, as well as the evolution of his creative work.
    The majority of Wilder’s papers may be found in the Thornton Wilder Papers and the Thornton Wilder Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. These papers and resources include correspondence, manuscripts, and other documentation of the lives of the Wilder family, including Amos Parker Wilder, Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder, Amos Niven Wilder, Charlotte Elizabeth Wilder, Isabel Wilder, and Janet Wilder Dakin. Throughout the endnotes, I have referred to the Thornton Wilder Papers and the Thornton Wilder Collection as the Thornton Niven Wilder Collection, or TNW Collection, YCAL. In addition there are numerous uncataloged letters, manuscripts, and other Wilder resources in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke. When they are quoted or cited, these documents are designated as uncataloged. Papers quoted or cited from other public collections are so noted. There are significant private collections of Wilder papers, but the holders of these collections are, by request, not identified in the annotations. Other libraries and institutions containing Wilder resources include the following:
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    Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly