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"Our Wilder: Progressive Education and Literary History"
Melanie Ho, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
March 2, 2006

The only American author to receive the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and drama, Thornton Wilder enjoyed an array of prestigious awards and a vast readership; counted among his friends and supporters such figures as Stein, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway; and remained a productive author from the 1920s until the 1970s. Despite such markers of literary success, however, he has received little scholarly attention. The few publications on Wilder attribute this neglect to the fact that his works -- thought to be occupied with “universal” themes instead of temporally-specific ones -- are too difficult to historicize, a problem for the period-based organization of literary studies. In this chapter, I propose that, in order to historicize Thornton Wilder, we first think about Wilder as he thought about himself: as an educator.  An instructor himself, Wilder not only considered himself to be a teacher first and a writer second; he was also deeply aware of the debates about education (its purpose and best methods) in which his closest friend, the controversial University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins, was at the center.  Through an examination of Wilder’s last two novels, The Eighth Day (1967) and Theophilus North (1973), this chapter situates Wilder within twentieth-century debates about education, particularly those that pitted Hutchins directly against philosopher John Dewey, arguably the most prominent figure in American educational history.  Furthermore, I argue that situating Wilder in an educational context does more than give us a way to historicize the author; it also shows us why he has been so difficult to historicize to begin with.  By considering Wilder in comparison to Willa Cather, another author of his generation who was involved in education, we can began to see how, while Wilder, the teacher, fits well within the most prominent ideas of twentieth-century American education, these same characteristics are what make Wilder, the novelist, seem so out-of-place.

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