From 1920 to 1921, Wilder spent a year studying archeology at the American Academy in Rome, where he participated in the excavation of an Etruscan roadway. He returned to America to teach French and to counsel at a prep school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey; he completed a master's degree in English from Princeton in 1926. Seven years later, Wilder was able to live on the income of his writing.
In 1930, however, Wilder returned to the classroom, teaching drama and poetry at the University of Chicago, a position he retained until 1936. In this same period, he worked for several motion picture studios as a screenwriter. During World War II, he served as an air intelligence officer and achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. For his wartime contributions, he earned the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Legion d'Honneur, and honorary membership in the Order of the British Empire. From 1950 to 1951, he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in poetry at Harvard. By the spring of 1962, Wilder, flagging somewhat in health, retired to Douglas, a small town in the Arizona desert, where he allowed himself the luxury of a two-year respite. Among the locals, Thornton was known as "Doc " Until his death in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1975, Wilder lived with his sister, novelist Isabel Wilder, and spent his time writing and traveling.
Wilder's acclaim is based mainly upon his novels, particularly The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), which won a Pulitzer Prize and established his popularity after being adapted for film and television, and The Ides of March (1948). His most famous plays are Our Town (1938), which was filmed in 1940 and reproduced as a TV musical in 1955; The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), a Pulitzer Prize-winning historical drama about Julius Caesar; and The Matchmaker (1954), which forms the basis for the Broadway musical and Hollywood movie Hello, Dolly (1963). As a result of his success, in 1965 Wilder became the first recipient of the National Medal for Literature.
The appeal of most of Wilder's plays is based on classic human values, which he draws from myth, fable, and parable as well as from the influence of James Joyce, Andre Gide, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Anatole France, and Gertrude Stein. Although it is not immediately apparent in Our Town, the play is grounded on a humanism which depicts life as both terrifying and wonderful. The author emphasizes the spark of immortality that exists in each human spirit.
