桑顿·怀尔德

桑顿·怀尔德（英语：Thornton Wilder，1897年4月17日—1975年12月7日），出生于美国威斯康辛州麦迪逊，美国小说家和剧作家。他是唯一用小说作品和戏剧作品获得双普利策奖的人。

生平

1897年，怀尔德出生于美国威斯康辛州麦迪逊，父亲阿莫斯·帕克·怀尔德，是一位美国外交官，母亲伊莎贝拉·怀尔德·尼文。怀尔德的父亲被分配到清朝工作，任职美国驻香港与上海总领事，因此他的童年在清朝度过。

1915年，怀尔德从柏克莱高中毕业，1917年，他考入耶鲁大学。

第一次世界大战爆发后，怀尔德参加了美国军队，在军队中中服役8个月。

1926年，怀尔德获得普林斯顿大学颁发的法国文学硕士学位，同年发表了他的处女作小说《奥秘》。

风格

怀尔德经常用生活琐事来反映自己对人性的看法，并且认为人性原始上是善良的，而且作品肯定人类长久遵循的道德观和价值观。

作品

1926年，《卡巴拉》

1930年，《安德罗斯岛的女人》

1931年，《漫长的圣诞晚餐》

1938年，《我们的小镇》

1935年，《我的目的地天堂》

1948年，《三月十三日》

1967年，《第八日》

1973年，《西奥菲勒斯北方》

1962年，《幼年》、《童年》和《来自助攻的某人》

1977年，《太阳下的生活》

1979年，《美国特色和其他散文》

Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.

Early life and education

Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor and later a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Thornton Niven.

Wilder had four siblings as well as a twin who was stillborn. All of the surviving Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China when their father was stationed in Hong Kong and Shanghai as U.S. Consul General. Thornton's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, became Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. He was a noted poet and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. Their sister Isabel Wilder was an accomplished writer. They had two more sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist.

Education

Wilder began writing plays while at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual. According to a classmate, "We left him alone, just left him alone. And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference." His family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 1910. He attended the English China Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai, but returned with his mother and siblings to California in 1912 because of the unstable political conditions in China at the time. Thornton graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915.

Wilder served a three-month enlistment in the U.S. Army's Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams in Rhode Island during World War I, eventually rising to the rank of corporal. He attended Oberlin College before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920 at Yale University, where he refined his writing skills as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a literary society. He earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926.

Career

After graduating, Wilder went to Italy and studied archaeology and Italian (1920–21) as part of an eight-month residency at The American Academy in Rome, and then taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, beginning in 1921. His first novel, The Cabala, was published in 1926. In 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success and his first Pulitzer Prize (1928). He resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928. From 1930 to 1937, he taught at the University of Chicago, during which time he translated and adapted André Obey's "Le Viol de Lucrece" (1931) into the play Lucrece which staged on Broadway in 1932. It was published by Longmans Green in 1933. In Chicago, he became famous as a lecturer and was chronicled on the celebrity pages. In 1938, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Our Town, and he won the prize again in 1943 for his play The Skin of Our Teeth.

World War II saw Wilder rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. He received several awards for his military service. He went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor. Though he considered himself a teacher first and a writer second, he continued to write all his life, receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1957 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. In 1968 he won the National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.