At the MacDowell Colony, where he had done much of his writing , THORNTON WILDER last summer became the first recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal. After the award by the president of the association, James Johnson Sweeney, Mr. Wilder, to the delight of his audience, read this new play, taking each of the parts with inimitable enthusiasm. CHILDHOODis the second in a cycle of one-act plays devoted to the Seven Ages of Man.
The tragic poets of Greece did not merely have to submit three interrelated tragedies for a single morning’s performance. The rules of the festivals required that the poets furnish an afterpiece called the satyr play. It was a reflection of the Greek sense of proportion that after those hours of horror and awe this afterpiece should be written in the comic spirit and should deal with some element in the plots of the preceding trilogy. Tradition says that Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides were great comic poets also, though very few of these satyr plays have survived. Thornton Wilder, having written a trilogy on the subject of the life of Alkestis, wrote also this short play to follow it. The reader is reminded that when Admetos, Ting of Thessaly, lay at the point of death, a message came from Apollo’s temple at Delphi saying that the King need not die if a volunteer could be found to die in his stead. His wife Alkestis offered her life; she died‚ but was later brought back from the underworld by Herakles. This play shows us how Apollo was able to obtain from the Fates that extension of Admetos’ life.
Novelist, playwright, and teacher, THORNTON WILDER combines the creative fire with the cool, objective delight of a critic. He began teaching at Lawrenceville after his graduation from Yale in 1920; he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey; his play Our Town (which non the Pulitzer Prize for 1938) is in production in some part of the globe almost every day of the year; and he richly deserved the Gold Medal for Fiction presented to him by the American Academy of Arts and Letters last spring. He is now working on a book which grew out of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard and which will be published next year by the Harvard University Press under the title American Characteristics.
Novelist, playwright, and teacher, THORNTON WILDER combines the creative fire with the cool, objective delight of a critic. He began teaching at Lawrenceville after his graduation from Yale in 1920; he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey; his play Our Town (which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1938) is in production in some part of the globe almost every day of the year; and he richly deserves the Gold Medal for Fiction presented to him by the American Academy of Arts and Letters this spring. He is now working on a book which grew out of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard and of which this is the second of several installments to appear in the Atlantic. The third will be in the October issue.
Novelist, playwright, and teacher, THORNTON WILDER combines the creative fire with the cool, objective delight of a critic. He began teaching at Lawrenceville after his graduation from Yale in 1920; he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey; his play Our Town (which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1938) is in production in some part of the globe almost every day of the year; and he richly deserves the Gold Medal for Fiction which was presented to him by the American Academy of Arts and Letters this spring. He is presently working on a book which grew out of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard and of which we shall publish several installments.