Something Wilder

When Thornton Wilder wore his glasses, which was much of the time, he had a mild, professorial air—like an owl, some said. Catch him without spectacles, though, and the change was extreme. His blue eyes had what one reporter called "a blade-like sharpness." They reminded you that behind his genial demeanor lay "one of the toughest and most complicated minds in contemporary America."

There, in brief, is the Wilder conundrum. When he is remembered today, it is almost always in his owl persona, as the folksy author of a folksy play, Our Town. But this gets both play and author almost completely backward. Done right, Our Town isn't a nostalgic wallow in small-town life, it's a harrowing story about human limitation—all the beauty and value we fail to recognize in our day-to-day lives. Far from being a homespun yarn-spinner, Wilder is one of the most sophisticated and penetrating writers the country has produced.

He's also, in his quiet way, one of the weirdest. A Wilder boomlet of recent years—a new collection of his plays, a new anthology of his letters to fellow cosmopolitans like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, a sterling revival of Our Town currently running off-Broadway—has just entered an especially captivating phase. This month the Library of America republished his first five novels. In style, setting, and subject, they dance around from ancient Rome to 18th-century Peru to the 1930s Midwest. They are also, for the most part, excellent—as compelling and puzzling today as when they first appeared between 1925 and 1948. Nobody who reads them could ever again mistake their author for a man right out of Pepperidge Farm.

For people who know Wilder only via Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, the mere existence of these books may come as a surprise. In fact, his fiction came before his drama. Though he won a Pulitzer for each of those plays, he'd already collected one in 1928 for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Even now, he remains the only writer to be so recognized in both art forms.

Wilder achieved all of this thanks first to those uncanny eyes. He perceived with equal acuity the tiny details of daily life and the grand sweep of space and time. After graduating from Yale in 1921, he spent a year doing archeology in Rome, an experience that changed his outlook forever. Once you've dug up a 4,000-year-old highway, he said, "you look at Times Square as a place about which you imagine some day scholars saying, 'There appears to have been some kind of public center here.' "

That Roman year also gave him material for his first novel, The Cabala, in which the fruits of his distinctive vision become clear. Though Wilder resorts to a couple of iffy supernatural flourishes, his story about a young American getting tangled up in the lives of Roman gentry has an insinuating style. The accounts of the characters' romances and family histories are like being treated to gossip in high WASP style. (Though he was born in Wisconsin and spent his early years in China and California—prefiguring a life spent zipping around the globe—Wilder came from New England Protestant stock, and not the late arrivals, either.)