Books, Arts & Manners: An American Uncle

The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder, by Gilbert A. Harrison (Ticknor & Fields, 403 pp., $19.95)

It is an odd experience to learn that the author of Our Town and The Matchmaker was once attacked for ignoring American subject matter in favor of dimly imagined classical worlds full of “little lavender tragedies.” But those are the grounds on which a leftwing writer named Michael Gold took exception to Thornton Wilder’s novel The Woman of Andros in the pages of The New Republic in 1930. Although one tends to forget it, Wilder was indeed almost as likely to set his works in Rome or Peru as in Grover’s Corners or Yonkers. Gilbert Harrison, himself once an editor of The New Republic, pays sustained and sympathetic attention to all of Wilder’s imaginative worlds in this large new biography, which reveals a man whose far-flung sensibilities made him friends with Gertrude Stein and caused him to fill 1,198 pages of his journal with notes on the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega.

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Thomas Mallon

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The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder, by Gilbert A. Harrison (Ticknor & Fields, 403 pp., $19.95)

It is an odd experience to learn that the author of Our Town and The Matchmaker was once attacked for ignoring American subject matter in favor of dimly imagined classical worlds full of “little lavender tragedies.” But those are the grounds on which a leftwing writer named Michael Gold took exception to Thornton Wilder’s novel The Woman of Andros in the pages of The New Republic in 1930. Although one tends to forget it, Wilder was indeed almost as likely to set his works in Rome or Peru as in Grover’s Corners or Yonkers. Gilbert Harrison, himself once an editor of The New Republic, pays sustained and sympathetic attention to all of Wilder’s imaginative worlds in this large new biography, which reveals a man whose far-flung sensibilities made him friends with Gertrude Stein and caused him to fill 1,198 pages of his journal with notes on the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega.