Wilder, Thornton [Niven] (1897-1975) came to Princeton frequently in the early 1920s to browse in the stacks of the old Pyne Library on evenings when he was off duty at Lawrenceville School, where he taught French and was a master of Davis House. He entered the Princeton Graduate School in the fall of 1925 and received an A.M. in Modern Languages here in June 1926. He had previously attended Oberlin and Yale, where he received his A.B. in 1920. He got the idea for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, ``on the winding walk from the golf club to the Graduate College.'' He began to write The Bridge in his rooms on the top floor of the eleventh entry of the Graduate College and finished it in Davis House the following year while teaching again at Lawrenceville. He left this area in 1928. A decade later, in 1938, his first play, Our Town, opened in McCarter Theatre. It won a Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most frequently produced plays in America. He won a third Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for his play The Skin of Our Teeth.
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton
University Press (1978).
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