Theophilus North

Product Description

A twenty-nine-year-old teacher attempts to achieve his nine life ambitions while passing the summer in Newport, Rhode Island

Review

Novel by Thornton Wilder, published in 1973. The last work published during Wilder’s lifetime, it has striking parallels to his own life experiences and may be considered a fictionalized memoir of Wilder’s idealized artistic and philosophical life. A first-person reminiscence of life among the rich at Newport, R.I., during the summer of 1926, the novel is narrated by the elderly North from a distance of 50 years. —

About the Author

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. His Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). Wilder’s The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly!. He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and films. (His screenplay for Hitchcock’s Shadow of Doubt [1943] remains a classic psycho-thriller to this day.) Wilder’s many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee’s Medal for Literature.