He went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor. He received several awards for his military service. Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. World War II saw him rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. In 1938 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Our Town, and he won the prize again in 1943 for his play The Skin of Our Teeth. From 1930 to 1937 he taught at the University of Chicago, during which time he published his translation of André Obey's own adaptation of the tale, 'Le Viol de Lucrece' (1931) under the title 'Lucrece' (Longmans Green, 1933).

He resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928. In 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success, and his first Pulitzer Prize (1928). His first novel, The Cabala, was published in 1926. CareerĪfter graduating, Wilder studied in archaeology and Italian in Rome, Italy (1920–21), and then taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey beginning in 1921. He earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926. Īfter having served a three-month enlistment in the Army's Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams, Rhode Island, in World War I (rising to the rank of corporal), he attended Oberlin College before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale University in 1920, where he refined his writing skills as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a literary society. Thornton also attended Creekside Middle School in Berkeley, and graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915. He attended the English China Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai but returned with his mother and siblings to California in 1912 because of the unstable political conditions in China at the time. And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference.' His family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 1910. According to a classmate, 'We left him alone, just left him alone. Wilder began writing plays while at The Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual.

Wilder in his Yale College graduation photo (1920) Both of his other sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist, attended Mount Holyoke College.

His sister, Isabel, was an accomplished writer. His older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, became Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, was a noted poet, and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. All of the Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China. Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor and U.S. Thornton Wilder with his two sisters and their father Amos at family cottage in Maple Bluff, Wisconsin (1900)

Thornton wilder 1938