Volume 32, Number 18 · November 21, 1985
Global Villagers
By Harry Levin
The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961
selected and edited by Donald Gallup, foreword by Isabel Wilder
Yale University Press, 354 pp., $25.00
The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder
by Gilbert A. Harrison
Ticknor & Fields, 403 pp., $19.95
In 1949 the bicentennial of Goethe's birth was celebrated by an international symposium at Aspen, Colorado. What other American man of letters at the time, if not Thornton Wilder, could have met so well that cosmopolitan occasion? His topic was the Goethean ideal of world literature, which he proceeded to demonstrate by translating the German and Spanish addresses of Albert Schweitzer and José Ortega y Gasset. Wilder had attended a German school in China, when his father was serving as consul there. Later on, after graduating from Yale, he had spent a year of classical studies at the American Academy in Rome. Nicolà Chiaromonte characterized him as 'the only contemporary American writer who is literate in the European sense,…the humanistic sense.' Some of his compatriots regarded Wilder as being all too literary, too widely traveled and highly cultivated, for his own good as a writer. On that score he was stridently attacked, despite his popularity and geniality, from two very different points of view.
Review, 2944 words
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