Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Cabala | 1926 |
| The Bridge of San Luis Rey | 1927 |
| The Woman of Andros | 1930 |
| Heaven’s My Destination | 1935 |
| The Ides of March | 1948 |
| The Eighth Day | 1967 |
| Theophilus North | 1973 |
Publication Order of Plays
| The Trumpet Shall Sound | 1926 |
| The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays | 1928 |
| The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act | 1931 |
| Our Town | 1938 |
| The Merchant of Yonkers | 1938 |
| The Skin of Our Teeth | 1942 |
| The Matchmaker | 1954 |
| The Alcestiad | 1955 |
| Plays for Bleecker Street | 1962 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| American Characteristics and Other Essays | 1979 |
| The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939-1961 | 1985 |
| The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (With: Gertrude Stein) | 1996 |
| A Tour of the Darkling Plain (With: Adaline Glasheen) | 2001 |
| The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder | 2008 |
About Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder (1897 to 1975) was an American novelist and playwright, and the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and drama. He won for the novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” and for the plays “Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth”, and later received a National Book Award for the novel “The Eighth Day”.
Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on 17 April 1897, the son of a newspaper editor who became a U.S. diplomat. He spent part of his boyhood in China, where his father was posted as Consul General, and finished school in Berkeley, California, in 1915. After two years at Oberlin College he transferred to Yale, graduating in 1920, then studied archaeology and Italian at the American Academy in Rome. He taught French at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey from 1921 and took a master’s degree in French at Princeton in 1926.
His first novel, “The Cabala”, was published in 1926. “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” followed a year later: it tells the stories of several unrelated people who are on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, and asks why they were the ones to die. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 and was the best-selling work of fiction that year. With the royalties Wilder built a house for his family in Hamden, Connecticut, which remained his home.
“Our Town” (1938), set in the fictional Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, is performed on a mostly bare stage and narrated by a Stage Manager, a part Wilder played himself on Broadway for two weeks. “The Skin of Our Teeth” opened in 1942. “The Merchant of Yonkers” failed in 1938, but Wilder revised it as “The Matchmaker”, which ran for 486 performances on Broadway and became the basis of the musical “Hello, Dolly!”. He also worked with Alfred Hitchcock on the screenplay of “Shadow of a Doubt”.
During the Second World War Wilder served in Army Air Force Intelligence in North Africa and Italy. “The Ides of March” (1948) is a novel about the events leading up to the assassination of Julius Caesar. He began “The Eighth Day” while living alone for twenty months in Douglas, Arizona. His last novel, “Theophilus North”, appeared in 1973 and was filmed as “Mr. North” in 1988. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and died in Hamden on 7 December 1975.