EDITORS’ NOTE

As HarperCollins completes its Thornton Wilder Library reprinting of the author’s novels and plays along with releases of them in audio and digital formats, we are pleased to add our current issue to the ongoing celebrations of Wilder’s one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday. In it, you can find previously unpublished Wilder correspondence, new and exciting Wilder scholarship, and interviews with theater practitioners influenced by Wilder. Also included are reviews of performances of Wilder’s plays from the first post-pandemic theater season. Tested by time and the pandemic, Wilder’s writing continues to inspire writers, theater directors, scholars, and audiences because he asks all of us to “Pay Attention!”We open the issue with an epistolary account of a literary friendship between Thornton Wilder and Timothy Findley, one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s, who was a novelist, dramatist, and actor. Findley’s biographer, Sherrill Grace, has carefully edited sixteen previously unpublished letters, two postcards, one telegram, and one published letter Wilder wrote to Findley between 1954 and 1970. Wilder as a mentor is on full display with his “tough talk” and writerly advice to a young writer.Two scholars apply Camp theory and a historicist lens respectively to read Wilder’s fiction and drama. Grace Vowels explores Wilder’s 1934 novel Heaven’s My Destination as an example of artifice and Camp, while Charles Martocello demonstrates how the history of New Jersey is relevant to our understanding of Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth. Haas Regen conducts two interviews, one with playwright Noah Haidle, the author of Birthday Candles, and the other with Vivienne Benesch, director of the play’s recent Broadway premiere. They talk about the influence of Wilder’s classic 1931 one-act The Long Christmas Dinner on Haidle’s writing and contemporary American theater. Jeffrey Ullom reports on Kirk Lynn’s work-in-progress, an adaptation/completion of Wilder’s unfinished late play The Emporium, which was workshopped at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, last June.Wesley Longacre’s review of recent research and scholarship in Wilder Studies is followed by two book reviews. Stephen J. Rojcewicz Jr. praises Thomas S. Hischak’s The Thornton Wilder Encyclopedia for its production histories. Anne Mahoney acknowledges the value of studying the classical influences on Wilder’s writing and encourages further comparative study in her review of Stephen J. Rojcewicz Jr.’s Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature.In the Performance Reviews section, we offer six reviews; five are of recent productions of Our Town across the country, from Florida to Washington, DC, to Nebraska to California. Joseph R. D’Ambrosi praises the Asolo Repertory Theatre production in Sarasota as “minimalistic and diversely cast.” Commenting on the Nebraska Repertory Theatre production, William Grange highlights the original music composed by Emmy Award winner Craig Woerz in collaboration with Broadway musical director and conductor Charlie Alterman. He focuses on the director’s exploration of Taoist ideas and on the influence of Austrian poet Rainer Marie Rilke on Wilder’s play. Two California productions are notable for one director’s effort to make this “transcendent masterpiece” relevant to today’s audiences and the director of the other’s “theatrically holistic” approach. Steven J. Rojcewicz Jr. commends the Shakespeare Theatre Company production for inspiring “brilliant performances by a true acting community.” The sixth review, by Shoshana Greenberg, is of the Lincoln Center revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, which featured an entirely Black cast in the main roles and received six Tony Award nominations. We hope that in reading these reviews you experience vicariously how Wilder’s two classic plays have enjoyed a significant role on American stages opening to post-pandemic live performances.Reviews of notable performances and current research on Wilder, interviews with theater professionals influenced by his work, new scholarly approaches to that work, and previously unpublished materials by Wilder are the types of material we hope to continue to publish in the Thornton Wilder Journal. Comparative studies of Wilder’s writing and the writing of his family members as well as innovative teaching approaches, discussion of translations, reception, and innovative nonprofessional productions in the United States and globally are also welcome. We look forward to hearing from you and wish you what Wilder hoped for Timothy Findley in a 5 May 1967, letter:

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