Thornton Niven Wilder's Our Town is a major work in the canon of American theater. Translated and produced throughout the world, it has been called a poetic chronicle of life and death. First produced at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 22, 1938, the play wavered in Boston, was moved to New York, and, to the surprise of both the playwright and his collaborators, won a Pulitzer Prize as the best play of the season. Our Town remains a perennial favorite among directors, particularly in small-town productions.
Our Town pays tribute to traditional American hometown values. Deceptively simple in structure and tone, the play represents many of the author's humanistic views. In an age obsessed with the unusual and the bizarre, the neurotic and the psychotic, Wilder turns his attention to the attributes and universality of the ordinary citizen. Making no apologies for his nostalgic journey into the past, he asserts his optimism in an age of pessimism.
Although Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, April 17, 1897, his tastes are not regional. He tends toward the mainstream of the American tradition. Both of Wilder's grandfathers were clergymen, and he himself considered going into the ministry. His parents — Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Thornton Wilder — believed strongly in culture and stressed religion, education, and intellectual pursuits to their five children. Early in his son's life, Amos Wilder studied economics and edited the Wisconsin State Journal. Through his friend President Taft, he was named America's Consulate-General to Hong Kong in 1906. Thornton Wilder, therefore, received his early education in Chinese missionary schools in Hong Kong, Chefoo, and Shanghai. Upon completing high school in Berkeley, California, in 1915, he attended Oberlin College for two years, served in the coast artillery in 1918, and graduated from Yale in 1920 with a degree in classical literature.
