Yale Archives Yield Potential Thornton Wilder Play From 1948 Drafts
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · May 27
Yale Archives Yield Potential Thornton Wilder Play From 1948 Drafts
1 articles · Updated · The New York Times · May 27
Pale green archival boxes delivered at Yale’s Beinecke Library in 2018 contained thousands of heavily revised pages that may amount to a previously unknown Thornton Wilder play.
The material appears to date to 1948, when Wilder was already a major literary figure, but the draft survives as a chaotic mass of loose sheets, red-pencil edits and marginal notes rather than a finished script.
That makes the find notable because Wilder’s final play was long thought to have vanished, raising the possibility that an uncompleted late work by the 1897-1975 author has been hiding in the archive.
Any authenticated discovery would extend the record of a writer whose Pulitzer-winning works include 1928’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” 1938’s “Our Town” and 1943’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.”
Why did a Pulitzer-winner abandon his final play, leaving it for another writer to complete and stage decades later?
A lost play from an American master is now on stage. Is it a faithful revival or a modern re-imagining?