Part One

BEGINNINGS: 1909-1920

THORNTON NIVEN WILDER WAS BORN IN MADISON, WISCONSIN, on April 17, 1897. His twin brother died at birth, and, according to family lore, Wilder himself was so frail that he was carried around on a pillow for the first months of his life. At the time of Wilder’s birth, his father, Amos Parker Wilder, was editor and part owner of the Wisconsin State Journal. By 1901, when Thornton was four years old, his father had acquired a controlling interest in the paper and was well-known in Wisconsin political circles.

Because his parents exerted an unusually strong influence on their children, a brief account of their backgrounds is necessary here. Amos Parker Wilder was born in Maine in 1862, grew up in the state capital of Augusta, and graduated from Yale College, where he was a scholar, singer, orator, editor of one of Yale’s literary magazines, the Courant, and a member of a senior secret society. After graduating in 1884, he taught for two years and then became a journalist, working first as a reporter in Philadelphia. He returned to New Haven to edit the New Haven Palladium, while also working on a doctorate at Yale. He wrote his dissertation on the difficulties and possible solutions of governing American cities, and received his Ph.D. in 1892. When he lost his editorship at the Palladium for attacking political figures who had a financial interest in that newspaper, he left New Haven for a position as an editorial writer on a New York City paper. In 1894, he traveled to the Midwest, intent on finding a newspaper to invest in and work on. He realized his ambition in the university town of Madison, Wisconsin, where, with his savings augmented by loans from friends, he bought a one-quarter interest in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Before the year was out, another important change occurred in his life: twenty-one-year-old Isabella Thornton Niven of Dobbs Ferry, New York, accepted his proposal of marriage, and on December 3, 1894, they married and returned to Madison to live. Isabella was the daughter of the minister of the Presbyterian church in Dobbs Ferry. Her maternal grandfather was Arthur Tappan, cofounder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who, with his brother Lewis, did much to support the antislavery movement. Both men were also prominent in backing the Oberlin Collegiate Institution and probably ensured its survival as Oberlin College. Isabella was a graduate of the Misses Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, where she published poems in the school paper and studied languages, piano, art, and literature. Before her marriage, she attended concerts, the theater, and lectures in New York City and was attuned to the cultural offerings of the day.

The literary interests of Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder were reflected in their habit of regularly reading aloud classics and Scripture during the childhood of the four children who were born during the next five years: Amos Niven (September 18, 1895), Thornton Niven (April 17, 1897), Charlotte Elizabeth (August 28, 1898), and Isabel (January 13, 1900). Amos Parker Wilder, an active Congregational layman, was also very concerned with his family’s religious life and with the cause of temperance.

During the first years of their marriage, because of the loans on the newspaper that Amos Wilder had to repay, money was scarce. Nonetheless, in 1901, they managed to build a cottage on the shores of Lake Mendota in Maple Bluff, just outside the city of Madison, where the family lived each year from early spring until late fall, and Isabella Wilder was able to take a European trip with Madison friends. Amos Parker Wilder almost certainly supplemented his income with lectures on municipal government at the University of Wisconsin, and, as he was becoming a well-known speaker, with engagements on similar subjects around the state. His eloquence was often grounded in his moral certainties, which sometimes strained relationships with political allies. In 1903, this occurred when he changed his paper’s editorial policy from support for the “progressive” wing of the Wisconsin Republican party to the more conservative “stalwarts.” Around this time, he began to explore professional opportunities outside the newspaper business.

In 1906, he sought a position in the consular service, and with the support of Yale friends within the Republican party, he received an appointment as U.S. consul general in Hong Kong. After twelve years of residence in Madison, the Wilder family sailed for Hong Kong from San Francisco only days before the earthquake there. They arrived in Hong Kong on May 7, 1906, shortly after Thornton’s ninth birthday. Life in Hong Kong offered a complete change from the neighborliness of Madison and the activities associated with its homes, shops, and public schools.

Just five months after their arrival in China, the new consul general and his wife decided that Hong Kong was not a good place to rear and educate their children. On October 30, 1906, Isabella Niven Wilder and the four children left Hong Kong, returned to San Francisco, and settled in Berkeley, California, another university town, where the children were enrolled in the local public schools. Their father sent money to support them, supervised their upbringing long-distance through detailed instructions in letters, and saw them on home leaves. Their mother supervised their daily lives and kept Papa informed of their progress; his children wrote to him regularly about their activities and thoughts.

In early spring 1909, Consul General Wilder was promoted and transferred from Hong Kong to Shanghai. Before taking up his new post on June 1, 1909, he paid a short visit to his family in Berkeley. In the fall, he made another trip from Shanghai to California, with a plan for reuniting his family in Shanghai, because he believed it would be a better situation for them than Hong Kong had been. The family reunion did not take place until more than a year later, for Janet Frances, the fifth and final Wilder sibling, was born on June 3, 1910.

In December 1910, Mrs. Wilder embarked on the S.S. Mongolia for Shanghai with her four youngest children. The eldest child, fifteen year-old Amos, was sent to the Thacher School, a boarding school in Ojai, California, established in 1889 by a Yale acquaintance of the senior Wilder. This was one of the country’s first “ranch schools,” where each boy had a horse to care for, took camping trips, and learned wilderness skills, along with partaking in the usual sports and college-preparatory course work.

Mrs. Wilder was physically unwell in Shanghai and distressed by the unsettled political situation in China. Her doctor suggested a change in climate, and in mid-August 1911, she sailed for Europe through the Suez Canal with her two youngest daughters, Isabel, now eleven, and Janet, just over a year old. They landed in Genoa and proceeded to Florence, Italy, where they joined Mrs. Wilder’s younger sister, Charlotte Tappan Niven, and their widowed mother, Elizabeth Lewis Niven. Mrs. Wilder’s sister was running a hostel for the international arm of the Young Women’s Christian Association.

After some time at a German school in Shanghai, Thornton and Charlotte were sent to the China Inland Mission Schools in Chefoo, approximately 450 miles from Shanghai. They enrolled in the spring term of 1911 and remained there until August 1912. Charlotte attended the Girls’ School and Thornton the Boys’; they were permitted to visit with each other for an hour each week. Wilder’s friends at Chefoo included Theodore Wilder (no relation) and Henry Luce.

Amos Parker Wilder took home leave after his wife sailed for Europe. He visited his elder son at Thacher, conducted business, and saw friends in Madison. He consulted with doctors, because he had developed Asian sprue, a digestive disease that had left him in a weakened state. While still in the United States, he made arrangements for Thornton and Charlotte to leave Chefoo before the fall term and to take passage on the S.S. Nile for San Francisco. They arrived in San Francisco in early September 1912. While Charlotte boarded with family friends in Claremont, California, and attended the local public school there, Thornton joined his brother, Amos, at the Thacher School. During Christmas vacation, Thornton and Amos visited Charlotte and stayed with her and the family with whom she boarded. For the three older Wilder children, the important news was that their mother and two youngest sisters, whom they had not seen in over a year, were planning to return to Berkeley in the spring of 1913. A few months later, the family was reunited, although again without their father.

Amos graduated from Thacher in June 1913 and was sent to work in an orchard in northern California before leaving in the fall for Oberlin College. Thornton attended an arts program at the local public school in Berkeley and helped his mother get settled. He did not return to Thacher. He and Charlotte (although she was a year younger than Thornton) began their junior year together at Berkeley High School, while thirteen-year-old Isabel attended the local McKinley Elementary School, and three-year-old Janet remained at home with her mother.

In the spring of 1914, Amos Parker Wilder, whose Asian sprue disease had worsened in the Shanghai climate, resigned from the consular service and returned to Berkeley, where it was decided that Isabella would stay until Thornton and Charlotte had graduated from high school in June 1915. Charlotte’s father took her on a trip to Yosemite Park, but the trip was cut short when he became so ill that it became necessary for him to travel to New York City earlier than anticipated to receive medical care. He remained in the East, returning to his old college town of New Haven, where he accepted the position of secretary and treasurer of the Yale-in-China program and prepared for the arrival of his family after Charlotte’s and Thornton’s high school graduations.

Although separated from his children in California, the elder Wilder carefully planned their summer activities. He believed that his sons should use their school vacations to exert themselves physically in healthy outdoor labor, to expand their experience to include practical, homely tasks, and to associate with people in a setting that contrasted with the more familiar urbanity of Berkeley. Between his junior and senior years in high school, Thornton was sent to work on a farm in San Luis Obispo. After his graduation from high school in 1915, Thornton came east and learned from his father that he was to work on a farm in Vermont before following his brother to Oberlin. The Wilder brothers, however, did not overlap at Oberlin; Amos, under his father’s guidance, had transferred to Yale College for his last two years.

Oberlin College was founded in 1833 by members of the Congregational denomination, which played a significant role in the abolitionist movement. It was the first college in the nineteenth century to have a racially integrated and coed student body. Oberlin also had a music conservatory attached to it. The Oberlin College that Thornton Wilder attended for two years, beginning in 1915, represented the continuing tradition of evangelical Congregationalism, which combined a concern for social causes, personal religion, and missionary work; in a more secular but related mode, the college emphasized teaching and public service. It was a high-minded, serious institution, and while supporting athletic teams and literary and drama clubs, it was much given to religious pursuits such as class prayer meetings.

At Oberlin, Thornton continued to develop his musical interests—he sang in choral groups and took instruction in violin, piano, and organ—which was traceable to and encouraged throughout his boyhood. He also published fiction and plays in the college literary magazine. His Oberlin experiences helped him to shed some of his social awkwardness among contemporaries, an endeavor encouraged, perhaps, by this public acknowledgment of his literary talent. At Oberlin, he renewed his Chefoo friendship with Theodore Wilder and forged close new relationships with undergraduates Robert M. Hutchins, Ruth Keller, and Nina Trego, and with Professor Charles H. A. Wager, the chairman of the English Department. During the summers after Thornton’s freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin, his father continued to arrange for him to work on farms attached to institutions the senior Wilder admired: the Mount Hermon School farm in Massachusetts in 1916, and the farm at Berea College (often referred to as the “Oberlin of Kentucky” because it had been founded on the same ideals as its sister school in Ohio) in 1917.

In the fall of 1917, at his father’s behest, Thornton Wilder entered Yale College. He had to repeat his sophomore year, possibly because some of his Oberlin credits were not transferable. The family was housed in nearby Mount Carmel, approximately eight miles by trolley from the center of New Haven. Now they were living together, or at least near one another, with the exception of the eldest child, Amos. He was driving an ambulance in Paris, then later on the western front and in Macedonia, before he joined the American Field Artillery after the United States entered World War I. Charlotte, a junior at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, was not far away, and Thornton lived on the Yale campus in downtown New Haven. With the exception of a job in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1918, and a little more than three months’ military service in the Coast Artillery on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, Thornton spent the next three years at Yale, in proximity to his family. In fact, after his brother’s discharge from the army, the two roomed together at Yale before both graduated in 1920.

As at Oberlin, Thornton Wilder’s literary output at Yale was prodigious and his talent noted and appreciated. His pieces were published in the Yale Literary Magazine almost upon his arrival on campus. At Yale, however, he gained recognition in a literary milieu that tested his worth against other gifted writers and expanded his acquaintance with others interested and influential in the arts. During those three years, he was elected to esteemed Yale literary societies, among them the Elizabethan (“Lizzie”) Club; Chi Delta Theta, a senior literary society; and the Pundits, a group of undergraduates known for their wit and high spirits. He was elected secretary of the Pundits, and he also won writing prizes for two genres: short story and drama. At Yale, he reunited with Henry Luce and Robert M. Hutchins; began lifelong close friendships with musician Bruce T. Simonds and librarian Gilbert Troxell; and met poet Stephen Vincent Benét, playwright Philip Barry, and publisher John Farrar. He found mentors in Yale English professors Chauncey B. Tinker and William Lyon Phelps. In June 1920, as Thornton Wilder completed his undergraduate education, he knew he wanted to be a writer, but he had very little notion of how he could afford to become one.

1. TO ELIZABETH LEWIS NIVEN.¹ ALS 4 pp. Yale

<Berkeley, California>
April 24. <1909>

Dear Grandma,

I had no trouble in cashing the check, for which I thank you very much. My income is not large and I am always thankful for a gift.

I am to join the church very soon. Also Amos.²

Mr. Miles our new minister has had preparatory class for several weeks. He is a Yale man a friend of Mr. Parsons and Father.

I would <be> very happy if—I could live in Europe but Mother is not at all sure we can go.

You know I am in the Episcopal choir. Tomorrow the Bishop comes and is to give two gold pins, one for deportment and one for attendence. I am to recieve the one for good deportment.

We feel glad that uncle Thornton³ likes to go to Washington.

We had a Bach Festival Thursday in which the Mass in B miner was given with great succes.

The Chicago Symphony orchestra is coming. The Ben Greet players⁴ are also to be here in the Greek Theatre, where the Mass was held,⁵

your loving grandson
Thornton Niven Wilder

Wilder family in Berkeley, 1910. Left to right: Isabel, TNW, Isabella, Janet (in her lap), Amos N., and Charlotte.

Wilder family in Berkeley, 1910. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

2. TO AMOS P. WILDER.⁶ALS 2 pp. Yale

<Berkeley, California>
<mid-December 1910>

Dear Papa,

Tonight I am going to Rev. Browns Church to hear Handel’s great Oratorio “The Messiah,” sung. Do they ever have anything like that in China?

Our Piano has been taken away now, and the sitting rooms little cold without it.

We are going to Miss. O’Connor’s for tea this afternoon.

Janet Frances Wilder⁷ now weighs 12 ½ lbs at 6 months.

Yesterday afternoon I left the letter unfinished, as we left for the O’connors. I came home early and started for “The Messiah” first I went & met Margeret Miles, who invited me, and then we went way over to North Berkeley and got her friend a Mrs. Nipper (I think). She was once a missionary in Turkey. She is very, very sweet. When we got to Dr. Brown’s Church it was 7.15. We went in and found that it was not the “Messiah” this year, but Saint-Sean’s Christmas Oratoria “Noel”.⁸ I was not at all disappointed as Margeret expected. The music was beatifully discriptive; angel and shepard Chorus and recitatives of the first Xmas.

Lovingly
Thornton Wilder

3. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., AND ISABEL WILDER.⁹ ALS 4 pp. Yale

<C.I.M. Schools, Chefoo, N. China>
<Spring(?) 1911>

Dear Family,

This is a letter we write instead of a composition, I suppose. It is a specimen of grammar, spelling and writing and it passes through other hands than your own.

I have been (relabled) relabeled and rechristened. No. 10 cell 19; Commonly known as Wilder Minor, because of a Major a roommate of mine.¹⁰ He is about my age and about my size; I know a few others too. I am put in a class much higher than I ever expected and there is some doubt of how long I will stay. Im allready tackling the six major declentions in a Latin grammar and the rudiments of Algebra.

The Officials in the streets here wear the sensational looking Cholera noseguard.¹¹

The journey up wasn’t so very calm, and I was seasick once, but it wasn’t at all bad. There was a Baron on board with a son and daughter. The son read a french edition of “Anna Karénina”¹² and the daughter slept. On board there was also a french officer who could not talk any english; But he stuck on me thinking I was a french scholar somehow and talked french to me for quite a while. I went away as soon as an excuse came up and played with two black cats. Later for the dare of it I returned and asked him (I dont know how to spell it right)

“Parlez vous Allegmanne, Monsier?”¹³

The man admiring the suberb accent and unapproachable grammar pour<ed> out his soul in french to me with much gesticulation. I went away.

The boys here talk a kind of slang of there own which is very funny at first. They spoke a while ago of a ship going “horribly” slow, and of one another being “abject” clowns. The boys on the ship gave me the scare but I’m over it now; the thing of it is “that they always are calling one another silly idiots” and “abject fools” and any other thing of the sort. Last night as I was lieing in bed I heard from all the other rooms the goodnights and parting thrusts. They were very funny. I wish I could have taken them down. Most of the boys have nicknames; “Ape”, “Parsee”, derived from Percy, “Spadger<”>, “Iago”, “Pollywog” and many others.

We just had singing a few minutes ago. The boys all learn by the Sol-Fa System and the music-books looks like Hiroglyphics (tell it to the cook, mater).

You can send this to Amos?

Lovingly
Thornton Wilder.

4. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<C.I.M. Schools, Chefoo, N. China>
<Early May(?) 1911>

Dear Papa,

I have just received your letters. I see you saw that I could not find your picture. I did not know how you would take it, I see you have or else some one else has, and as for mama’s idea of my looking for it, that is impossible, the trunks being kept in inner sanctuaries, and I would not ask the matrons to let me go and search after it after they vowed it wasn’t there. And about Mother’s picture it has been blown around the room by the Chefoo monsoons (Janet’s too) untill the “fall of the house of Wilder” is complete. Now a roomate has lent me a frame of his and she swings on the wall.

For Mothers and Auntie’s¹⁴ benefit (From the latin bene—good) (ahem!)

I will recount our meal today.

<in the margin appeared a diagram of three tables, labeled with names> <left-hand table: at head> music teacher <at foot> Helper <middle table: at head> Mr. McCarthy <at foot> Chief Housekeeper <right-hand table: at head> Mr. Murry, Lea or Mr. Alty <at foot> Wardrobe mistress <below the drawing> Females all helpers! A whole army each with a nickname.

At the end of the tables sit the teachers who deal out the soup and meat. The plate with the meat on is passed to the centre of the table where the prefects sit. The prefects pour on vegetables and gravy. (If the decks-out<prefects?> are mad at you they either pour on Mts. of food or just a little.) Today we had soop

Entrée a crust to be eaten with (soup)

Vegetable soop (commonly known as Dishwater.)

Meat (lamb) Rice, potatoes and greens (weeds).

Dessert Yellow Tapioca in flowing liquidity

This last is call<ed> tuck-shop pudding because it is given on candy-shop days. I do not buy candy any more, but buy photos of the cricket teams etc that have the portraits of my friends in. I have begun violin with (Mr) Murray commonly known as Shinter).

I am learning a few trios to play with him-self (he play cello also) and the piano-teacher. I am also in a dozen, stands for the glee-club—I suppose. Tonight again is bath night. I suppos you saw in my next to the last letters that I found that which I thought was lost. I’m glad I found it.

My german has also begun, we have a sharp, irratable lady-teacher who gives us (that Walter Hearn and I are the only German pupils) awfull hard prep. (from the word preparation meaning Home-work). I went to the beach today after Sweet-cupboard and found a cats-eye. Wilder I found nine! He has much better eyes that<than> mine (Cats-eyes)<.> Both of us are called “Wildcat”<.> About the Boracic Acid, she told me to come every saturday morning and made me wash my eye in one of those new-fangled eye-buckets, she calls it a (gentle) Eye-bath. I guess thats all right. I am sorry to say that I was not a good enough rower to get in the boat-club, but I am in the tennis-club.

Lovingly,
Thornton Wilder

(P.S.) Last Cricket day I made 3 runs.

(P.S.) We drill with Indian-clubs. I am just beginning to learn how.

5. TO ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed C.I.M. Schools, / Chefoo, / N. China) Yale

Friday, <August> 11th 1911

Dear Family

I am in doubt as to wether I did, or did not, send my sunday-letter. I remember the post-boxes were not there when I went to bed, but I could not find it in my pocket next morning so I thought maybe I had mailed it early-morning or not. I think there was nothing more important in <it> than a mountain of love, and that is free. My sweet-cupboard in the form of Aunties box gave out a while ago but Fathers is open now. But Auntie is not forgotten even if the symbol of herself has given out. Today is bath night, I think it is my fifth bath. You told me to describe more minutely a few things. Now comes the bath. The First night I was here I had a great deal of Su<r>prise given to me. Mr. Taylor one of the masters called out:

“All those who have not had a bath lately come up here.”

I went forward to my great imbarrasement, there were a few others too. “Allright” he said, I was to have a bath. The Bathroom is a great hall made in to stalls in which is a tub of boiling hot water, one honest inch high, I went down and tried it. From all parts of the room come shrieks of Pain. “Ow! Ow!” I was told that these were from unfortunates who had projected their toes into the brimestone. Later, after fifteen minutes for dressing undressing and bathing a prefect calls out

“One minute more!” Wild shrieks of protest greet this proposal.

“Aw, Wobbles (one of the prefects) give me so<me> more time.”

Wobbles with a watch in his hand hollars out:

“Half a minute.”

Screams.

“All Out”

Silence. Wobbles never knows which people are in which bath and the doors are shut. By and by boys rush out their doors and run past the prefect who gives a resounding spank as the fugitive’s pass. This is the bath.

Violin begun today. Mr. Murray gives me two half-hours a week, and I am to practice as much as I like. (He’s very kind, I’m sure) He’s evidently been selftaught but he teaches alright. Thank you very much for that San Juan Fernandez stamp it is a fine one; the school is subjugated at my feet for they all wish the stamp. Had cricket again the other day; the worst game out (sorry)

Thornton Wilder

Mother—I tried my white suits today. Good fit. Mother? How about those flannel ones you made? There are more in my trunk, she says: There must be some mistake.

6. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<C.I.M. Schools, Chefoo, N. China>
<September 1911>

Just a few snatchy mid-week (on Friday night) words with two important things to say.

1^st. About Amos’s birthday present sadly delayed as it is.¹⁵

In birthdays I saved up (from a interesting assortment of occupations) 2 gold dollars (pumping organs and vending programs are hard work in a dignified guise). One went to the plague that time in Shanghai, and the other I wish to send Amos. If you think that he would take it as a insult and send me Mr. Thatcher’s¹⁶ grandfathers embroidered glove with the finger holes, if I say, he would take it as a affront on his pecuniary wealth, then we might steep it in—may I say—permit me—steep it in a volume like “The Scarlet Pimpernel” (Dickens)¹⁷

I myself not being embarrased by affairs of the wallet, or being bowed down by the weight of a empty pouch, do submit and approve the present of the sum in question without as the poet says “without the garb of secret Charity.” And impress him with the overwhelming regret which floods me from the neglect and tardiness with which I seek to accomplish this duty. I have bequeathed (?) it to you to despath the bounty, but I will write him my emotions. (Samual Johnson very weak)

“It is enough.”

2^nd. The subject for the Taylor Prize History exam is out.

“The Life and times of Alcibiades”¹⁸

Please try and gather something about him from some learned friends etc. I have the Plutarch’s lives (arr. for Children)¹⁹ at Hand (Charlotte²⁰ has it in the Girl’s School). Try and get some quotations about him from Heroditus, Xenophon, Thucydides and some other old chapies!²¹ You live in a very mixed society maybe you have some unbusy scholars for friends.

I thank you very much for the offer you have sent me. I have chosen two. The first of Kipling, is short stories of which I have read one.²² Very eager for the rest. “The more you eat the more you Want!” (Egg-o-see?) I will give that to Charlotte when I have finished.

The next is by a favorite of Mr. Phelps of Yale.²³ Mother and we read all of his other books in Berkeley. It is much heavier reading. I am glad to see the Ymca approves them. Remember Alcibiades and Amos’s birthday gift. Lovingly

Very Lovingly, my dear Papa
Thornton Wilder.

China Inland Mission Boys’ School.

China Inland Mission Boys’ School. Private Collection.

7. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<C.I.M. Schools, Chefoo, N. China>
<September 1911?>

<appeared vertically above and along the margin of page one>

Dear Father,

I have taken care in Part I of this letter to express what I mean. Mothers letter held no words that I would not have you see. There was that part of my self that Mother shares with me: the expression of Sentimentality. If you had seen it I would feel your pooh-pooh recieval would have been sure. I have tried hard to explain, as I know it lies heavy on your mind-heart. There is the milky, sensarous, even slovenly side of affection in which I cannot imagine you partaking, the face-gazing, and silly part of it, which is to weak and light for big, powerful people.

Dear Father,

I see you were rather worried about Mother’s Private Letter. It has become a delicate subject, and it was a tactless thing of mine. But if I could explain and glaze it as it should be glazed and smooth there would still be a rankling in you, I suppose. The only thing to do is to tell of its drift. First, it was very lush and sentimental, the mood that Mother can accept, if she is ready in her mood of a letter from the son. Again I sought to make a letter show how I had grown very different in my opinion of her while I was away from her and explain that I did see a difference her being near or in far-away Europe. To make it more solemn—or more special—I also named it “Private.” You had been begging private letters for long. Mother expected none, I did not think that she would not feel a little pleased. Is this enough?

I received “Molly—make-believe.”²⁴ I read it before, on the “Mongolia,”²⁵ but I was very glad to get it, I have nothing but praise for the way it is written. It is so very original. Did you not think so?

The only thing that seem<ed> to cast a shadow was the falling away from Cornelia of Staunton. It was the same with “David Copperfield.” Davids ardour for both Dora and Agnes seemed to lessen his loves for one or the other, and here Cornelia enlists my sympathies to a great extant. The characters are but the types of many a story, nothing new there; but the idea of a Serial-letter Company is so finely original that it would rescue anything. I consider a book fine according to its originality. That is why I dislike Scott²⁶ and the costume Romantists. As for the Parody and the swear word, they I suppose are the acrobatic gymnastics necessary to the atmosphere of the “best-sellers.” Just like a pistol shot in a Melodrama, or a trill in a popular song, all un<nec>essary necessities.

The last of the boys are expected soon. Yesterday another of my intimate circle arrived.

Yesterday also we were invited to the Malpas’s for tea. After tea we took a walk. I went ahead with Mrs. Malpas and talked advanced Music. She played one of those difficult, flashy pieces in a concert not long ago, but I liked Dr Smiths singing of Shuberts “Erlkönig”²⁷ more. He sang beautifuly, dramaticaly. Mrs. Malpas played “Alice where art thou”²⁸ with variations, I would rather have heard a classic

Lovingly,
Todger Wilder.

8. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed C.I.M. Schools, / Chefoo, / N. China) Yale

Feb. 10.—<19>12

Ma Caro Donna,²⁹

It has been said somewhere (you may know where) that “a house divided among itself can not stand;”³⁰ I dare not say that that aphorism may have an exception but still this house has managed with help of some of the boys to keep a-going in spite of a strike of the servants!

The Revolutionary headquarters here have offered $18 a month for all men who will join the army as recruits,³¹

Result = All of are<our> “boys” who work on $8 a month leave for higher wages

Result = No servants have got,

Result = Boys work.

Result = Wilder II washes dishes and cleans carrots, serv<e>s table, and carries water for other people (boys) to wash in (not himself! Oh No!).

But, my dear Mother, that is not the reason that that “cherub” Thornton does not write to his martyr Mother and Grandmother. If he is as you might say a “cherub” surely he would not neglect his folks without a very believable excuse, but again if the “little darling” has no excuse then by Euclid and common sense he is not a “cherub” but a very thoughtless youngster.

All this juvenile raillery is the desired thing for a school letter like this one, which will, “si possible” be followed by another with something above “ennui” in it (and with out any <“>bad french quotations”<)>

Directions pour la Musique

Lento á la valse     And now “Believe me”     as the lady said to the cocatrice

Largamente     I am yours as the toad stool said to the Ostrich

Appasionate    Lovingly

Humilisimo     Thornton Niven Wilder

Grazioso     Best Remembrances to my Grandmother and her other daughter, “My Lady of Patience.”³²

(Later) Evidently, Mr. Lea our Master does not think this to be the “desired thing,” maybe he would like me to tell you how “Evan’s Bunny died” and how I lost my book and such trash.

9. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 3 pp. Yale

<C.I.M. Schools, Chefoo, N. China>
Sunday Night
March 3—<19>12

My dear Father,

This is my first letter since you have been ill. I suppose you look to it with interest, to see how I have taken your leave. Oh, my father, of course I am very sorry that you have gone but if you needed it, may there be no complaint from here.

I am afraid you will not get this letter until you get to Madison which will probably be a long time; yet if you have stayed with Amos very long (which I hope you will have done.)³³

I have no cause to complain of being left here because Amos has been left alone in the continent with no other members of the Family.

Oh, but Father, I wish I could see Mother. It seems many years since I saw her last. I want to see her very very much. When you make your plans try and let me be near her and Amos. And of course father dear, I want you too; my dear Papa—all together.

I have a little duty here now. A Doctor Jones came up here a little while ago and left his son here. When he went away I saw he was much moved by going (and remembering another farewell that was hard not long ago) away from his laddie. I came up as he was going and spoke to him a little in a friendly tone. Immediatly the man opened up and left the boy in my charge. I have just written the Father a little note about the boy.

A boy that was here in the boys school when I first came, who graduated and left last graduation Day, has come back for a little stay here. He and I have always been very familiar. We are having a fine time together now.

Avery perplexing thing has happened. In your departure you forgot to pay Miss Richard’s violin Music lesson bill. It amts. to about $43. She says she has been “advised” to send it to me<.> I of course will send it to my “men-gardians” Mr. Dorsey or Lobenstein. It is a difficult thing to settle, but I guess it will be all right.

Rowley Turbeville Evans wishes to be remembered to you. He is not yet a prefect but we all expect he will be soon. He is a fine boy.

It is communion tonight but I have firmly decided on once in two months. Mr. Lea gave a talk at Communion lately against people setting a time for communion like that. But I think unless I feel that definitly I must go, I will keep to <a> fixed time.

Was that hint at sending me home only a false alarum. May it be so!

Remember <me> with all affection to the Madison Friends. To Mrs. Sheldon Johnson, Stevenson, Kellog (and Miss Kellog) Whitney and above all Miss Donoghue to whom I yet will write.

Remember me to my friend Mr. Taft. Ask him when he’s going to give me my papa for good and all,³⁴

And now good night

May love and peace attend you always

Lovingly
Thornton Wilder.

I am sorry I can have no more definite address.

10. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 6 pp. Yale

<C.I.M. Schools, Chefoo, N. China>
July 14—<19>12
Sunday Evening

My Dear Mother,

You will easily forgive my writing with pencil on this school Exercise Paper? The intimate aire of these will appeal to you I’m sure?

Mr. Alty who is on duty today exhorted us boys to get our letters written before we go to bed. Not that these are the class letters to be perused by the master, but that because yesterday was a holiday (& so we were unable to write our class letter)—for that reason is firm about our writing private letters to you now.

I am going when I finish to ask him to lend me his “Elijah” or “Messiah.”³⁵ But if I went to him now he would ask me if I had written my letter and I would very modestly (eyes on the floor) lisp “No, thir.” “Well go along and write your letter first.” That’s the way things are done!

The boys of the upper school were, this morning—in the rain, invited to a funeral. The daughter of Mr. Roe the Head of the Sanitarium, Partner in the Business Department (the store here) and teacher of Bookkeeping to the Upper Fifth Form had died of unexpected fever evening before last.

Mr. Roe came to the grave supported by strong men & deadly white. They say that he may die. Poor Mrs. Roe who walked beside—far frailer than Mr. Roe was visibly trying to comfort her husband.

There were visible effects on Mr. Murray who has lost more than five children & has only one—& the other extreme Mrs. McCarthy who has 5. Mr. Murray had his only Duncan beside him & Mrs. McCarthy was beside her Brian.

I am glad you approve of my Latin poetry researches. Charlotte hates Latin and spurned Horace Odes Book III and Aeniados I which I offered to her. I have now added to my other collection: Aeniados Books II & VIII & all of Horace Odes, Epodes, Satires (fine!) Epistles & fragments, & a book of Selections from Ovid. I have done nothing more in French or German other than learning occasional lists of words.

To continue my self-educating theory in other realms, I have been doing a good deal of Piano lately Both for Practicing in reading & general playing<.> I go thro’ the set of Beethoven Sonatas that have separate names to them viz: Moonlight<,> Pathetique, Waldstein (L’Aurore Dawn), Pastorale & a little of Charatristique & then of course I do my Mother’s, which I am preparing for Exhibition Day (although I will probably not be here.) I have also Chopin’s Preludes, one flashy one of which I am learning by heart for those people who ask & papa will not allow me to refuse. Now Dear Mother good night and Isabel & my little sister Janet (oh lovely photo!) do you feel lonely without Auntie & Grandmother? I am there, I am—Before long you will see me—no—I will see you till then.

Very, very Lovingly
Thornton Wilder.

Lots of love for Isabel & Janet—can Janet understand Goodnight does she know she has a little Brother?

Just another little note to put these stamps in with the letter. These are just some of those sent me by Father not long <ago>. The others are really too good—ancient kind. But there are three real nice ones here.

I can imagine the lady as a little elderly german with bright and red cheeks. She has a shawl on and she spends most of her time in hotel corridors.

I am getting along pretty well with both piano and violin. I (by myself) am learning by heart a Grieg “Ballade” to play you.

All my examinations were above 80 out of a hundred.

Spelling 100, Cicero 93 English 87 Algebra 80 Lat. Comp. 82

In a few moments I am going to my Music teacher’s Mrs Lord’s house with my violin. She has called an assemb<l>y of most of the violin pupils with Mr. Cook (a teacher who plays viola) that we—with her husband who plays cello may have a practice on Schumanns Quintet for Piano and String. Won’t it be fine.

I am reading “Joseph Vance” over again.³⁶ I can remember just the parts you liked.

Do you remember good old Janey and Lossie? And the Shipwreck and Beppino. It half kills me trying to say whether “Joseph” or “Clayer” is better.

Lots of Love
Thornton N.

11. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Thacher School³⁷
Dec. 13?<January 13, 1913?> Sunday P.M.³⁸

<appeared perpendicularly beside first paragraph>

I can ride a horse pretty well now. Isn’t this a long letter?

Dear Papa Dear Papa—

I’ll try to give you a topical, typical letter for once—after your own heart. We’ll begin with

Music.

Out of my two lessons a week I think I am making progress. On the Piano I take up that musical staple—Czerny.³⁹—velocity exercises to corrospond to the examples on velocity which we are taking in Algebra (of course they’re really physics (S =½ — gt 2).). Besides that they are parts of Beethoven Sonatas and Chopin Preludes. (What’s in a name! Those aren’t so imposing as they might be judged.) Then besides there are scales, finger-movements…

On the violin I am taking another set of exercises also for velocity. And some pieces. When in Claremont, as there was no orgonist in town, I took violin of a Prof. Staples.—Prof in the college of Music. He tried to graft a new method on me but I can not keep it up with my other teacher. On the violin I have already had six teachers to only two on the piano. In Claremont I played in the Sunday-School Orchestra twice. I recieved my Chefoo music prize and thank you for your part. Beethoven’s Sonatas have been called the musician’s Shakespeare and if ever you live in the same house as I do you’ll get to know them. Let us now take up the study of school-mates.

Boys

None of the Thacher boys are original. They are all of the same cast whereas at Chefoo each boy was to any other as blue to red. Some people might like the Thacher plan. Do you? Some of the boys are nice and polite and very proficient in small talk and white lies, but so are waiters! N’est ce pas? One of the boys—my especial—altho’ by no means kindred—spirit, is named Harrington Shortall.⁴⁰ He hails from the fashionable side of Chicago and is ever-so aristocratic. Altho’ he looks at me as a common little street-gamin nevertheless he plays duets both 4 hands at Piano and Piano & violin (I being the violinist). He <His> views on music and musicians, book<s> and authors are delightfully conteradictable and afford many pleasant arguments. He will cling to Mozart as a staff of life whereas to me Mozart is merely tune & barber-shop chords except in a sonata for two pianos that I heard in Claremont. But as sometime in the far future you will hear somethings more I will pass on to the subject of

Claremont

We had a lovely Xmas time at Claremont. The Maynards are ever so nice and Charlotte couldn’t help but have a continual picnic.

The astronomy lessons we had were wonderful.⁴¹ They were the most interesting things too. We saw the craters on the moon and learnt a few of them by name. We saw Venus one of the morning-stars that sang together the “Sanctus” of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. We saw Saturn and the 2 rings. We saw the Nebula in Orion. Billions <appeared below “Billions”> “2 × 4” of miles square and yet you can’t see it with <the> naked eye. And we got talked to—the man like the ever-juvenile Mme. Bottu would stay over time and be late to his meals.

We went to two or three parties, one of them a surprise party which was lots of fun. An awful lot of High-school girls and boys were waiting when we got there. I hope you’ll get something yellow out of your house there. The house itself is Rheumatic but the lot is worth while. Maybe the college’ll offer you a castle in Spain and a genii bottle for it. You never can tell (G. Bernard Shaw.)⁴² We were waiting eagerly for our Lady of Florence to dawn<?> upon us, but we are yet to wait. Thank you ever so much for your two dollars, I’ll probably get some soulful music with <it> or some instrument of { the muses Torture

From Mother I got this writing Paper and some cuff buttons.

“ Amos a dollar—thereby hangs a tale

“ Charlotte all Shakespear in one volume!

“ Isabel a part of Mothers.

“Janet” ” ” ”

“ Miss O’connor a lovely Japanese Print Hokusai’s The Wave!⁴³

“ Mr. O’connor Arnold Bennetts “Milestones”.⁴⁴ Etc.

Now Father this has been a long letter to make up for the Seven Egyptian Years of drought. But Father look at my correspondence list.

Father

Mrs. Malpas & Mr.⁴⁵

Mother Isabel

Grandma

Aunt Charlotte

1 About 5 chefoo boys

2

3

4

5

Mr. O’connor

Miss O’connor

Vincents

Hannas

Robertsons

Mrs Moore (nee Maxwell)⁴⁶

A young lady I met at my orgon lessons who demands letters.

The length of the list scares me. Where shall I begin<?> Mr. Murray’d be mad if I wrote to Mr. Lea only. Vice versa etc. Telegraph solution

Now adieu my dear Poppy—well, strong, and happy, glad, good and gumptious.

With lots of love from
Thornton Wilder or Nifty Niven the petrified Sleuth.

12. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Thacher School
Jan. <19(?), 1913> Sometime ad 20
Sunday.

Dear Mother,

Whenever anything happens during the week of any real interest I put it down on my mind for my corrospondence but today there is only one thing to tell so we must dig up some past treasures. That one thing is told soon but long remembered. “Namely”, as Cicero would say; that after much waiting the play for the Dramatic club here was at last decided upon. It was to be given at the time of the Tennis Tournament when all the Parents come from far and near to various feats of their children. Their is the Tennis Tournament, a big dance in the evening and the next evening the play. All the days are planned out—with a feature of every morning and afternoon such as shooting-matches, gymkhana’s etc. Well the play decided on was Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of being Earnest,” a very unny rivolous arce. We had the tryouts and I was cast for one of the leading characters: Lady Bracknell, a very sharp, lorgnette-carrying old Lady. I began learning my part right off and fell to work trying not to laugh at the clever epigrams I had to say. I was never so happy in my life (never mind that phrase) until that evening I was in the parlour looking at some Magazines and Mr. Sherman T. came in.⁴⁷ He stood against the mantel and put his back to the fire. Then he coughed and called me up to him.

“Oh Thornton” he said, “your Father said in a letter that he would rather not having you in the plays taking female parts, so, altho’ he didn’t absolutely order you, I think we had better do as he says.” I was terribly disappointed. Now another boy has the part. It’ll be very un-funny to watch the part I might be taking. The worst part of all comes in the explaining to other boys all about how my uritanical ater disapproves etc

Now to rake up a page and a half of other news.

You remember that there is a prize of books to the boy who reads the most during the year? Here is my list so-far

William DE Morgan

Joseph Vance

Somehow Good⁴⁸ } fine, both of them.

Arnold Bennett

Milestones Mr. O’C. Xmas Present fine.

How to live on 24 hrs. a day⁴⁹ fine too

The Truth about an Author⁵⁰ “ “

Charlotte Brontë

Villette Very fine.

Jerome K. Jerome

Passing of the Third floor back.⁵¹

Yeats.

The Land of Hearts Desire⁵²

Kathleen Na Houlihan⁵³ }Very lovely

and quite a few more.

In prospect I have

Mrs. Gaskells

Life of Charlotte Brontë⁵⁴

Cranford⁵⁵ (for a second reading)

Charlotte Brontë

Shirley

Jane Eyre.

Margerite Audoux

Marie-Claire That novel by Parisianne Sempstre⁵⁶

Robert Browning & Mrs B

Letters.⁵⁷

Fitzgerald, Edward

Letters.⁵⁸

They say these last are very fine but Father won’t let me read the Rubaiyat of Omar!⁵⁹ I’m sorry I’ve left it till now but I want to thank <you> very heartily for this papier and the cuffbuttons, one think <thing> I have on and the other I’m writing on.

Lots of love to Isabelle Janet and yourself

from
T. N. Wil.

13. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 7 pp. Yale

<Thacher School>
March <1913>

Dear Papa

(Having received your letter of admonition, I resume the letter-writing. I find it conveniant to mention the matter very little.) Dear Papa

I have one piece of news which will perhaps please you. Altogether now I have ridden to Norhoff⁶⁰ and back (10 miles) 5 times. Your clipping of Admiral Dewey would do as an advertisement for Wilkinson’s Horseshoes but hardly as a lure.

I like riding all right but the only thing is its hurts. It made some huge blisters on me. I’ll probably get used to it some day.

My horse is the nicest old thing ever bridled. He is old—well on in his teens—and white—really white, not white like a white man—but not slow or dull or lifeless. He was called Blanco before I got him but as he doesn’t seem to recognize it, I offer you to cho<o>se one of these for him

{Harlequin

{Cathay or

{Pax.

Until then I will probably call him pax after my twin.⁶¹ If you think its a crime to call him pax why then—cable. He really is awfully nice tho’ of course after all the only thing he does is to keep his eyes open for hay or keep them shut in sleep, which polite society does not consider the best Formula for living. Now to talk about some other things you have asked me about. Books I have been reading. Not long ago I read Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of C. Bronte. Most people think that next to Boswell⁶² it is the greatest Biography ever written tho hardly the most cheerful. To make a glorious comparison pretend that our Charlotte (that adorable minx) was that Charlotte; grant Mother to have died some six years ago leaving on her the whole burden of a Mother then suppose that you have two more daughters both of whom die of consumption; In the meantime (There is no room for Amos in the illustration) I go very directly to the bad and cause much worry. In the mean time you get blind and cross (incredible!) and Isabel (Emily Bronte) writes a great book (Wuthering Heights) and dies of consumption before it is ever published or accepted as immortal. Also Janet writes a nearly great book (Anne Bronte and her <“>Tenant of Wildfell Hall”⁶³ all about me and my fall) and then she dies of consumption. <appeared at top of page next to page number and before text> (What page five? Infandum!⁶⁴ incredible) If you feel like <it> by all means read it. I have also been reading Charlotte Brontë’s “Villette” and am now on “Jane Eyre” Now about some of the other things in which you are interested—classmates. I think I have already told you about the boy who has a room next to me Spencer Hancock Logan, son of the Chicago Millionaire wheat broker (I suppose thats what they’re called.) The other day he got a telegram running something like this—no economy in sight—

“Dear Spencer We are feeling lonely now and unless you want to take your trip into the mountains very badly we would like to have you come home for the Easter Vacation.”

Of course it’s very plain that Mrs Logan (scilicet $1000 paris gowns) is unwell because Spencer will only be able to have 4 days in Chicago at the most. He went this morning after a affecting farewell with me. When I get an invitation to spend my holidays in Chicago your not to stand in the way even if it is The Theatre or a dance every night—excepting Sunday of course. Please don’t write him a separate letter because he doesn’t think very much of your not letting me act in the play. On the other side of my room is Frank Bromwell<?> whose Father and Mother have just come down from Seattle in their $5,000 Packard Automobile. Beyond him is Russel Tracy whose parents have two automobiles. Mr. Tracy has just been at Shanghai I hope you met him; he went out with Mr. Goss, your new vice-consul. I may learn a little more about your private matters—from other people. Here are a few jokes <remainder of letter missing>

14. TO AMOS P. WILDER. TLS 1 p. Yale

<Berkeley, California>⁶⁵
<September 1913>

Dear Father,

Art School over and High School on, what can I do but take time seriously and wright (rather good, eh) you. I am again prepaired to perhaps fall in with another school (did you get the split infinitive, a sign of superior litery apprenticeship). I have just finished my first week at the Berkeley High, and notwithstanding my dislike for the national Philistinism, I rather like the school from my third-personal impersonal view. The beauty of the school is that so far it has left me entirely alone. I confess that I never expected that. I got a little of that at Chefoo, but never a drop at Thacher. I like it on that account very much. I am taking Vergil Aneidos Book Four. English and Geometry, the same as Sharlie, and also beginning Greek. I hope that it will be many years before that study of Greek stops. It will start something like this: First week—study. Second week—Xenophen. Third week—Testament. Fou<r>th week—Plato. Fifth week—Homer. Sixth—Venerable Tragedians. Seventh—Slangy Comedians<.> Eighth—Sappho. But I think I will reverse the order. The only other study I take is German. I think I will make a new paragraph, if you dont mind.

About those postal-cards, or better, panaramas, I assure you that I did not intend to send them to you for circulation, as you said. That would be the expression of mere ridiculous childish enthusiasm, the kind that rises suddenly from nowhere demanding cooperation, hurraying and eagerness from every hand. (How foolish and didactic that last sounds, meant to be a mood-or-point-of-view-picture, also a kind of fierce at my own youth, buttered-over with that very thing. And what an inane kind of thing it is, but maybe you havnt recognize<d> it, I dont know whats arroused me, but here I am with my hair up.) What an awful dirth of periods ive left behind me. Moral: Keep your hair on.

Kwong Ling⁶⁶ goes to church with us every Sunday, but we let him out, after childrens sermon. The poor boy doesnt understand a word, I myself taught him for a while. I cant imagine what he does when the teacher asks him to read the Heading to the Paragraph or the Title of this Poem (registered in K. Lings vocabulary as song). I suppose he just gollops for a while and then says to himself in Chinese that four times three are twelve and three times—Oh well you know what hes like. Ugh. We cant change, but we can drop him. A new paragraph by all means.

(Later in the evening) School begins again to-morrow, but I do not dread it as at Th-etc, which after all as an institution was not equal to itself as a—supply the word yourself—I refuse to preach even in the good cause of disillusionment. After all a letter cant be like a verbal communication—in fact I dont believe that I would ever slush to you like this personally—so I guess I might as well end here as at the end of the fourtieth page, for ther would still be left the things one never writes and seldom says, and for one like me, never says; meaning, not that I do not feel gushy but that I am swathed in my Anglican Calm. (tommy-rot; how I have unwapped it this evening<)>.

Lots o Love
Cleaned of gush;
Come early and Avoid the THE ANTIDOTE FOR
SENTIMENTALISM IS
LUNACY even the types
going crazy. Hurray

(Thornton)

15. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

Berkeley Calif
Sept 21—<19>13.

Dear Papa,

I guess it’s been a good-sized “spatium”⁶⁷ since last I wrote but this time it was not idleness or distraction that caused it but real preoccupation. You may have heard that I have a dramatic venture on the Market and have on me the heavy habiliments of an Impresario. After a contest or try-out my little one-act farce “The Advertisement League”⁶⁸ was chosen as a “vehical” for a few of us in a vaudeville given by the Berkeley High School for the benefit of the New School Gymnasium which is the Reno Skating Rink made over! Of course the play is a magnificent treatment of all the problems that ever ruined the worrying-powers of man. Its dynamic force in the way of social uplift is almost as tremendous as it is negligible. My “cast,” 3 boys and 4 girls, all secured at a tremendous expenditure of debate and exhortion, are some zealous for it some pulling the other way; and our rehearsals, when there are no teachers present, are perfect nightmares for me. I get corrected to the left and uncomfortably pushed at the right. The performance will come off next friday night before an audience of 1200+. Of course I have adhered to your demand that I remain in masculine clothes. When you have changed your mind as to it please notify.

I am expecting a good report card tomorrow for my first semester.—. I went to the station with Amos the other evening<.> I think that if you had been there you would have wondered how such a thing ever came into your head. Let us hope that Amos’s “surrounding circumstances” in a strange land are favorable to a youngling and such as an average parent would wish for his son. Many fathers would consider themselves fortunate in having their son with at least one parent already in a University town knowing that home-life is quite as good as a higher education, but we’ve heard that Oberlin is well spoken of in that portion of Ohio.⁶⁹

What a lot of your best friends are away from Shanghai just now. Mrs. DeGray, Mr. Hinckley, (from Kwong Ling I hear bad reports of him), Malpus, Stedmans, Kwong Ling, and Ravens.

Mr. Darrach (Shakespearian corrector.)⁷⁰ has sent us $6 (gold!) worth of tickets. $2 per. for us to attend a super-quasi-hyper-post-fashionable recital at which “carriages are requested to call at 12.30 AM.” Kwong Ling, the gem, left the house-door key on the outside last night.

Lovingly—
Thornton Wilder

16. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER.⁷¹ APCS 1 p. Yale

<San Luis Obispo, California>⁷²
<P.M. June 15, 1914>

Dear Familie,

I have had two lessons in milking now. About two hours in all. Am still getting up to a four-o’clock alarm altho’ I don’t have to. Tell Violet <Vincent> and Miss O’C that I’m sorry I didn’t see them for an au-revoir. Typewriter is consideration. Watch still going nicely, tho’ I sometimes wish it wouldn’t say 4 A.M. Illuminating sidelights on the comparative values of pigs, cows, calves and horses, and human nature continue to reveal themselves. Went to Presbyterean Church last night. Sleep well as can be expected. Remember to Janet in reference to moo-cows and grunts. Wanted—Amos’ address. Tell Mother that I bought overalls and will probably not need my suits except for Sunday evenings! The great crises of life resolve themselves into milking-times and pig-feeding hours

Lovingly T.W.

17. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

<Berkeley, California>
Nov. 18—<19>14—

Dear Amos,

I sure hope we can keep a room at Yale, but it<I’ll> probably never get there.⁷³ Some small college Wooster und so weiter⁷⁴ is probably waiting for me and before I see the shaky New York-New Haven R.R’s Depot⁷⁵ you’ll be leaving it for a missionary post on the Koko-Kola Is—east of the moon. Whether next Thanksgiving Dinner be held—a tutti—in New Haven or with “remembrance for our loved ones scattered over the earth” is a matter that rests entirely on the strength of the adjectives in the Little Colleges’ Pamphlets on father’s desk.—N.B. Note for Essay = The Parcel-Post Xmas, or the House divided.

Mother here is working very hard for the Red Cross Society of Berkeley. She has been writing letters to all the ministers in town asking them to announce to their flocks that contributions will be received in Room 420 1 st Nat. Bank Bldg.⁷⁶

Charlotte is a red cheeked, so-so plump girl in glasses; everything she says would be described as “stoutly” or “emphatically” put. She has a habit of talking protestingly which is the lighter side of her infallibility. You may not realize it but its positively serious, the way Charlotte can’t be corrected. <appeared perpendicularly in left margin> Critique Severe sur une famille.⁷⁷ Reprove her; point out that she is in the wrong, and she says “All right” then if Mother continues to reprove, comes a “Oh, you’ll talk forever,” and then Isabel and I sit on her by roaring. It’s all based on great underlying consciousness of being perfect that often shows up curiously. You mention such a slight and plain fact as that she “cant sing—any more, that is, than any other person who can follow the choir in church” and immediately she raises her back with: “I can sing better than Isabel,” or a direct, “I can too.” Perhaps that isn’t a good illustration, but it may show where the wind blows.

Isabel is <a> very self-conscious, fluffy headed person, getting a little slangy, a little loungy-about, and a little vain, but all smiles when the sun shines. When she is told that her hair-ribbon (this is me this time) is crinkly or that she only two-steps to her waltz, she tries to whistle—like Uncle Toby in “Tristram Shandy.”

I will flay Janet and myself hereafter. I’ve left out the unconscious charm of Charlotte—a kind of tantalizing childishness, or the companionable good heartedness of Isabel, (when she gets there)—but again:

Love
Thornton Wilder

Wilder family in Berkeley, 1914 or 1915. Left to right: Isabel, TNW, Isabella, Charlotte, and Janet (in front).

Wilder family in Berkeley, 1914 or 1915. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

18. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

<Berkeley, California>
“Happy New Year” Jan 1. <1915>

Dear Papa,

San Francisco and Oakland and in its mild way Berkeley, howled in today last night; which was an appropriate beginning of the year, if you like that kind of thing.

I’ll be very glad to get out of school—any kind of school—and into something that doesn’t feel quite as much as if it were made—and run—with extensive equipment for educating forcibly—you-know-whats. No doubt Oberlin contains a greater amt. of it than Yale—Oberlin with its compulsory chapels and prescribed Scripture-class-work and its suggested Christian Endeavors, Bible-class, YMCAs and Temperance Society.⁷⁸ It does seem awful to hear me talking so; I who am the ridiculous ever-present of my own sunday-school boy’s division. The only one of my class of 12 to be present often; the official organist; the performer of official odd-jobs; moving tables and passing messages. <appeared perpendicularly in left margin> Excuse the Messes we’re crowded about this table. And while I play beaten-out hymns, I know how much more expressive and “religious” even simpler music can be, and how much more impressive and awesome pictures may be than Hoffman’s⁷⁹ saccharine representations; to say nothing of a better way of presenting the lesson to the others. Blagh!

I don’t know whether Oberlin will introduce me to another Mrs. Varney or Cecil-Smith with Elwoods and Lagerquist Minor thrown in.

I hope the $400 plus—that I will save by going to Oberlin will be really used; the rejuvenating of Mother, and the spanking of Janet are two humble suggestions. I feel a donor in the matter and will watch with great eagerness a blossoming out of freedom and breath from the chrysalis of care and pinch. As you know I am very fond of Theodore Wilder—I am often angry at myself for liking merely the niceness of people, but we did a great deal of laughing at each other, and I am fearful of mutual rasping—where I would like to be alone at Harvard or Yale with the Amy⁸⁰ and The Family—Love from

Thornton W.

Thanks ever so much for the dollar: Shall I put it with the static $10 in the bank or into cubist Music <illegible; letter torn> Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.

19. TO ELIZABETH LEWIS NIVEN. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<Berkeley, California>
Jan. 7—<19>15

Dear Grandmother

I am still thinking of some very nice way of using your dollar: there is my bank-account; and there is my growing collection of modern (therefore “discord-y” music,) then I could put it into typewriter rent and try and arrest and find nests for some of my wild ducks; or could go to every one of Forbes-Robertson’s four plays on his farewell tour when he comes to Oakland;⁸¹ or I could take Mother or Charlotte to better 50c seats to, say, “Passing of the 3 rd Floor Back <“>—as for myself I don’t mind the highest gallery. Then I could buy some really beautiful picture to hang over my bed. In the art store downtown is Whistler’s Battersea Bridge,⁸² and whenever your eyes go on it, you are there on the bridge in the evening with the lights of London above and “below” the Thames. Then there is one more day at the Panama-Pacific Exposition when it opens.⁸³ I have never in my life seen a well-known or great painting in the original, but there will be some there, and that is fine.

I guess when the fog has lifted over the “wortwechsel” ⁸⁴ which is now on—it will be decided that I go to Oberlin next year. There is a family there, the boys of which were my room mates at the Chefoo boarding-school, and by coincidence called “Wilder”—that will probably take me in as a boarder. Their oldest boy Theodore Wilder—which Mama says might have been my name—will be at college, too. I don’t much—very much—like going to Oberlin, and I think that a boy—if possible—should at least have some say about the college he’s going to. I want Harvard because it is more serious-minded and academic than Yale, and broad than Oberlin. It may sound awful, but I don’t like to fall into the folding-of-the-hands attitude about doing what father says all the time. Amos has got into that, and helped to make his college career weaker. When they ask him what his college is he must say: “I had two years at Oberlin and two at Yale.” He will not feel himself to be a real Yale man either, who has had at least three years to form a close friendship with his class. It looks at present as tho’ my college life will be thusly:

1 year at Oberlin

3 years “ Yale

2 years “ Harvard (Prof Baker’s postgraduate playwright course.)⁸⁵ I’d like to just not do it at all, tho. Just travel and write, and live in ordinary, city boarding-houses and in the second class and steerage of boats, and in European attics and among the people of China. And “accidentally” brush myself up against writers etc whom I admire, and get out of feeling that I’m always being hurt by father and always hurting him.

But my page is almost filled and it’s 10:10 P.M. so I will close thanking you again for your very kind and useful remembrance and sending much love to you and Aunt Charlotte. Maybe when I see you I will have finished this tiresome education—tho’ it will probably have taught me how to appreciate you and everything even better than now—

Your Loving Grandson,
Thornton Niven Wilder

20. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 3 pp. Private

2350 Prospect St. <Berkeley, California>
April 7—<19>15

Dear Amos,

It’s about time I began finding out about Oberlin from you and working out what I’d better do there. I submit this—:

English—anything—

Latin—Horace—

Botany—2^nd year—

German—“Willhelm Tell”!!!⁸⁶

reek? I want to take College very mildly and be able to keep all my irons and waffle-pans in the fire. I’d like to take choral work and harmony of music, but I dread piano or violin lessons. I’ve such a rough-and-tumble preparation.

I’m a perfect Firebrand in the Berkeley Oratorio Society here. I approach Herr Paul Steindorff on the choir’s singing Bach or something à capella. I open the windows when the contraltos find the air close and close them when the sopranos feel a draught. I show late comers the place, and vote for incumbent officers. We and lots of other local choral Societys gave the Stabat Mater⁸⁷ in the Greek Theatre on Good Friday and Repeated it in Festival Hall at the Exposition and each recieved two free gratis passes (50¢ value) into the grounds!

We’ve been having a two week vacation at Berkeley High and I’m picking up fine. I was beginning to feel like a saleslady on Xmas Eve. Along of my two complimentary tickets I’ve been to the Exposition three times. Its most wonderful. I almost feel I’d rather wander about among its courts and Lagoons and the waterfront (Marina) than in thru the miles of little streets insides the huge buildings. I wish you could come out. You might not be able to pick up with California again at first ie. in the morning<.> Sat. I sobbed and swung incense-burners in the Stabat Mater; in the afternoon I onestep-ped with Isabel and a friend of hers in the The Dansant in the California Building, I don’t mean that to be shocking—hommes angeles—schockire non passant—just illustrative—(Is there a verb for not able as theres one for not-wishing volo nolo—[nollo?]?)

Theres a lady here who knows the young Australian composer Percy Grainger⁸⁸ whos arrangements of old English etcs “Shepherd’s Hey” “Molly on the Shore” etc you heard the New York Symphony play. She says he’s got a perfect aureole of yellow hair—and he invited her to take tea with him and his mama. Send me the Aureole’s program if he comes your way. We get programs here, too. Our Berkeley Musical Society corresponds to your Artist Recital Course, only its probably not so cheap: We’ve had this season Arrigo Serato Italian Violinst; Efrem Zimbilist; Alma Gluck (alone); next Tues Julia Culp.⁸⁹ and then another. Student, single ticket $2.00.—and so on 11:20 P.M.

Affectionately, fraternally, insidiously yours
Thornton—eee—E-E-E- O!

21. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

<Berkeley, California>
<May(?) 1915>

Dear Papa,

Rowley Evans, of Shanghai, is a commissioned officer—according to Theodore Wilder and will soon be at the front. I wrote as evasive a nice letter as I could. Maybe I told you all this before.

¶ Charlotte and I took a long walk over Dwight Way hill for new flower specimans for Botany Class. Charlotte’s always threatening to go to all the lonesomest and most distant mountain-tops alone, and because of her perverseness she probably will some day, but until then I have to act as guardian and “take” her everywhere. We had a fine view of Mt. Diabolo from where we were today. ¶ I now play violin in a little orchestra conducted by a self important little Johnny, who knows all about conducting and taking tempos. This orchestra plays at the social evenings etc of our church. He keeps us sawing catgut on cheap waltzes, Spanish Dances etc from 7:30 to 9: + every Monday Evening. ¶ Then Tuesday eve. is Oratorio Society. I met a Thacher Alumnus, the Kerr Boy—he says he hasn’t paid any attention to the School for a long time—he’s in business now—; and that’s another side of the coin. ¶ Civics at school is a little more hopeful. We’ve been having “lectures”, lately à la College & Government Appropriations, Election information, etc. ¶ Mother got a letter from Amos lately in which he grows real sob-by about leaving Oberlin. He hasn’t known anything better yet; he’ll know what he’s missed soon. I feel that I know before hand. I feel I don’t want to go to College at all. College is just a broader, more roaring brighter world for a bounded High School Boy anyway. It seems that there Religion-Family-Obligations can be given up for a life with boys and glimpses into the Book-Experiance. There will be a change of happiness for the coming year, won’t there? Amos will be at Yale. I at Oberlin<.> Mother and Janet at<and> Isabel at the Plantation and Charlotte on the Hill.⁹⁰ And you with your sheaf of plans won; ¶ Janet has one eye almost closed with mosquito bite; Charlotte has a poison oak cheek—this has been “finely” written so I may now make my bow & withdraw. I remain, sir,

lovingly Yours
Thornton Niven Wilder.

22. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<Berkeley, California>
Tues. May 25—<915>

Dear Papa,

The other letter has been sealed, so I will send this under separate cover.

Dr. Henderson, after several careful search found some very valuable archaeological deposits in my mouth which turned out to be the debris piles such as mark the site of Troy. He careful<ly> removed the valuables to a less secluded spot and filled up the caves so that no rival explorer could find any careless leftovers to parade. What minor blasting and drilling and excavating there was called<caused> a good <deal> of trouble to the surrounding country. He foresees further work in the neighborhood—however he found the environs pleasant and well-kept.

I am going to get two more $.50 (cent) admission entrances to the fair free. On saturday we rehearse and on sunday we repeat Brahms—German (Protestant) Requiem. I wanted to send you a program but couldn’t get an extra before—this time I hope to. ¶ The fair-ground grows better and better on seeing. Mr. Torrey⁹¹ took us <to> two Boston Symphony Concerts lately and I went to one last night (yesterday afternoon) as Mother’s birthday present. (Your birthday is yet to be spent unless it has already gone into my collection of Modern Dissonental Music.) It was Russian night and very fiery and sad—and stormy and—hopeless.

Thank you ever so much for the Granville Barker Iphegenia in Tauris program. I hope you went—if so were you able to overlook the primitive-futuristic manner? I swear by Granville Barker and his wife, whose pictures hang at intervals upon my wall. I’d rather know G. than anyone in America or across. I can’t see how it could help being impressive even with the striped toward<?> and feather-headed soldiers. Lillah McCarthy must have been wonderfully dignified and expressive—I guess you got the best thing in the theatre way in the whole world except for their Trojan Women which is more vital. Very little choice tho’.⁹²

We graduate next Friday night. I do not feel it as a solemn occasion<.> I don’t think even mother can go and here it, because that will leave Isabel alone with the baby and possibly Kwong Ling—and we never leave the baby alone, and Charlotte graduates, too so “what to do?”

Graduating’s the strongest turn-of-the-thumb-screw anyway.

I’ve been doing worse and worse in School but better and better out. The last four weeks have brought more friends of<than> the previous twelve. All this rich concerting and the following of the latest things in my line all over the world.

Mrs. Williams burst out crying when she mentioned the assassination of Lincoln today!

—Lovingly
Thornton Wilder

23. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<Berkeley, California>
June 20—<19>15

Dear Papa,

The last week is about to begin since mother says I am to leave a week from tomorrow on Santa Fé.⁹³ Wed, Thurs & Fri. I take Yale entrance Exams

English I & II (a & b)

German a

U.S. History and Civil Gov^nt.

Virgil-Ovid.

And if you say I have to do full entrance requirements I must refurbish this summer & take in October

Caesar-Nepos⁹⁴ (failed when taken at Thacher; never had him in class work because of jumping him at Chefoo!)

German b

Plane Geometry

and?

I have already passed in

Cicero-Sallust⁹⁵

Algebra (a & b)

If I don’t pass some of the exes next week (and its at a six day notice) I’ll have to try again in September.

Prof. Nutting tells me that without these I would have to go from 1^st year Oberlin into 1^st year Yale and make a 5 year College course, or else stay two years at Oberlin and enter 3^rd Yale as allowed and it’s lucky you found it out in time. You’ve promised me one year at Oberlin to put off the time when the bloom is smudged and I have it in writing. Pleadings and resentful deportment when Jeptha is forced to keep his promise would not be the thing, either.⁹⁶

I have just got back from hearing Prof. Walter Rauschenbush⁹⁷ speak at the Baptist Church. Hes the man who wrote the prayers I wanted to introduce in family prayers, but I never think of when I’m at the library.

He was highly coarse “of the earth earthy” at the beginning of his talk and quite a few ladies around me left in loud indignation; but he was very good.

I’m looking forward to my train ride. I can’t be sure yet whether you’ll be able to meet me at New York. I can see myself jumping at you from the train-steps now and your <“>Well, well, well, well” that we’ve <had> at so many restorations. Of course I’m looking forward terribly to Amos too; I feel very much ashamed of myself, he is so much the real thing with the testimonial from every one. I dont seem to know anyone or to hold anyone long, but after Berkeley—again. Sometimes I wish I were a Japanese or a Chinese in America; it almost seems like being physically disembodied and holds humiliations of a kind I wouldn’t mind so much.

Rev. Brooks⁹⁸ has asked me to come up and see him some evening before I go. He doesn’t know me however and can’t give me what you wish he would in the soul-gouging way. Today I and Bower (the Soph in College) walked down to the Bay and out onto the long pier. I wish I had known of that pier before.

Will you try and arrange it so that Amos will be at the Summer Camp too? or has he tennis engagements?⁹⁹ Will you be there? I wish he’d be at Oberlin, Wilder Major (Theodore) used always to become very impatient in his amiable way of impracticable me, and would allow me to even ask him the date or such parasitic questions.

I will remember the Santa Fé as Your and My Route. With lots of love to you at the other end I remain your expectant

Thornton W.

24. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed The Bisonte / Hutchinson, Kansas) Yale

Dummerston Station
c/o Myron Dutton¹⁰⁰
Wed—13?<14> July <1915>

Dear Papa,

I’m almost too tired to write, but I’ll try some. I have a little gallery of blisters on the “cushions” beneath my fingers. Today there were three separate thunderstorms and between them ordinary summer weather. We had to work like fits yesterday aft. and this morning to get some hay in from the rain; since cut hay thats been wetted turns black “and the caows doant eat it with the relish they deoa other hay.” During thunderstorms farmers fold their hands so it wasn’t a too strenuous afternoon, but this morning I almost walked into my grave. First I cleaned the horses stalls, and washed the milk pails, then I helped wash the breakfast dishes since the eldest daughter was brought up sharp with appendicitis last night; <letter shifts from pen to pencil> then I swept and mopped the floor of the “inner room<”>—separated etc.; then I fed chickens and emptied swill pails; picked currants for a pie; raked hay and tossed it onto a wagon under a swiftly approaching storm; then it was about eleven o’clock; after the storm more haying until dinner; dried the dinner dishes and then, thank goodness was taken for a ride, until the short routine of the evening. <appeared perpendicularly in left margin> Forgot to say that I hoed beans for a while

The change from pen to pencil meant that at about half-past nine last evening Amos’s pen went dry and I had to put off the letter til the afternoon of the next day; this morning I had to be entirely domestic, and in addition to servant-maid work, I pared potatoes for two meals for seven; ! I can’t say anything and neither can you if it gets worse. Mrs. Dutton is approaching 0 thru worry over the appendicitis daughter and I have to help the one remaining. After dinner tho’ I did some more haying and I go back in a minute. At present while their putting hay in the barn there’s literally no room. Three big men are at it.

I tried my hardest to milk the first night but they haven’t thought <it> wise to call on the little stream I draw again

Lovingly
Thornton W

I like it all right.

Amos gets sick-spells and semi-faintings; I felt sick the first few days myself. What to do about him?

25. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

221 N. Prof. St. Oberlin
<Fall(?) 1915>

Dear Papa,

I have spoken to my class English teacher, Mr. Beattie and to Prof. Wager,¹⁰¹ head of the department of English, about my choosing Psychology as a major: They see very much why I don’t want to take their English major highroad. It’s not made for me. Its made for people who have to be talked to for two whole years before they know what to look for in Elizabethan poetry or Ruskin etc. Even majoring in Psych. I would probably take all the “disciplinary” courses in composition etc that I could get in.

Prof. Wells says that of course there are hardly any opening<s> for teaching Psych. in secondary schools, but that its very good in small colleges.

As for Psych. being suited to me of course I don’t know. I know that I’m interested as I can be in all the points of it that come my way, and that I’m speculating on sides of it in my own mind all the time. The laboratory courses in experimental Psych. would be most interesting of all. The d<r>udgery part of it would be the physiology of the brain, which they lay great stress on here. Zoology is required for such a major.

All I know is: that I can not major in English as its taught in Oberlin College, and that I believe myself suited to the study of Psych.

Besides, Mr. Wilder, my friends here don’t consider it very problematic whether or not I’ll be able to earn a living. When the Prof’s advise me not to give my work into the College magazine because I ought to be able to sell it someday, it must be an advanced case.

Here’s my money bill as near as I can make it. In the meantime my account has sunk to $4:40.

Board 9.70

Room 15.00

Train (16.00) (I called up the station and asked fare Oberlin to New York and they said $13.95. In the meantime I’ve forgotten what the N.Y. New Haven Hartford costs, and what a berth or so forth costs. So you add this item in yourself.)

Extra 10.00

Unpaid (50.70)

I seem to be writing you a letter every day. I’m not good-humored in this letter, tho’,

I ran the 220 in 32 seconds. I was about fifth from worst in a class of 35+.

They consider Psych. so impt here that they require every Junior student to take the year course.

Lovingly
Thornton

26. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<Oberlin, Ohio>
Dec 20—<1915>

Dearest Papa—

You say you especially like letters to yourself PRIVET so I’ll pretend this is one. ¶ I really think that the older I get the more homesickness threatens and it doesn’t really work at me in the right way—that is, of course, I ought to be feeling especially for you and Mama, but the person upper most in my mind is little Isabel. I’d love to walk her around here and show her to my friends and have her at table & Funny!—I’ve got a real lot to say so I’ll enclose a general letter, too. I find there is room-subject for a PRIVET after all.

What are you going to do about my Xmas vacation after all. I dread every mail that blows. I didn’t realize at first what it would be to have my Xmas three days after I enter an absolutely strange and unpleasing family. Amos used to give me “dramatic readings” of that household the only impersonation I can remember tho’ is the father & his accent. Oh, let me stay where I am. I’ll take my walks just as regularly as in term time! and longer. Quite a few other boys are staying here for me to get to know; and Mrs. Duncan has offered to me to earn my room-rent if I attend to the furnace. I hate to say to questioners that I’m going on a strange farm to do a little work during the Xmas vacation. And how can I go and do a little work? It was a little work that I was going to do at San Luis Obispo—(how did I ever get up at 4:15?), it was a little that I was given permission to do in Vermont, and it was a lot whatever Amos may say. I don’t want to go away; I’ll be good; I’ll be good. But I’m afraid this letter’s too late.¹⁰²

Lovingly
Thornton.

27. TO CHARLOTTE E. WILDER. ALS 6 pp. Yale

221 N. Professor St
Oberlin Ohio
<March(?) 1916>

Dear Old Girl

Its been some weeks since I wrote you so I’ll take up my pen now. I didn’t see much of you during the Xmas vacation so I’ll take the opportunity now to write to you now and thank you for the pocket diary. I’ll tell you about how it works.

Into it I only put memorandums of original work I do. And occasionally if I hear some especially beautiful piece of music, or read something very fine, I put that in too; but chiefly what I write. I’ll copy out a little just to show you.

Jan 5 Wrote sketch for Act II of “Graves Family”. Copied out Act I mostly.

Jan 6 Took four mile walk and thought out scenes of Act II—wrote them out in the evening

Jan 8 First Rehearsal of “The Last Word about Burglars.” Completed “A Fable for Those Who Plague.”

Jan 11 Wrote Finale Act I Graves Family.

Jan 12 Wrote Dorcas-Ella scene in Act I

Jan 28 Wrote opening of Act II with song.

Feb 12 Wrote sketch for Act II of “Ventures Joyous”

Feb 18 Sat up till 1:00 AM on Shakespeare Essay

Feb 20 Handed in “Sealing-Wax” to Magazine

Feb 21 Wrote “Brother Fire” <“>Three Minute Playlets for Three

Persons” No 6, and projected “Archangel’s Fires.”¹⁰³

Feb 26 The New Belinda (Ventures Joyous) growing in mind.

Feb 27 Informed of winning of Shakespeare Essay Prize, $10.

March 8 Verse Libre: 1. Gaby Deslys¹⁰⁴

2. Mirandolina¹⁰⁵

Sometimes whole weeks go by when I don’t do a thing, then two or three days running! I think that Feb 21 is the most important day there. Did you foresee this?

Now don’t you wish you were here. Oh, I know lots of girls you could room mate with, and not irritate each other, either way. They say you’ve almost improved to perfection now. Think of that!

Uncle Harry Peabody¹⁰⁶ spent the whole day here yesterday. I remembered him when I saw him. He preached in my church and I sat behind him in the choir. Then I took him to dinner at Dascomb.

Miss Marion Knight¹⁰⁷ said she saw you on the train going or coming from Holyoke.

Do you see anything of boys up there? You must get them to call on you, too, remember. I can’t have a sister who scares the boys away. I’d be pleased to death if I heard you’d become engaged—even if it was only a butcher-boy. Of course, I wouldn’t allow the match to procede; but still, I’d be feeling that you weren’t quite dead. I don’t want to come and hear your organist play a sentimental concert in the half dusk with a lot of sickening schoolgirls saying “Isn’t this just too lovely!” And I don’t want to sit up in the gallery and watch a pedal couplers—I’ll go to an organ recital where an organist attempts a huge Bach fugue, and tears your scalp off amid screams from the sensitive. No silver collection tip toe affair, but a carry-out-the-corpses, women-and-children-first function.

I’d like to give your Dr. Wooly¹⁰⁸ a try, but I wouldnt be impressed by the fact that she <with> the colored hoods down her back would turn my fren’ Gaby Deslys pea-green with envy. Gee, but I’d hate to be the president of the girls’ college and be aware of that waves of foolish admiration and unstemmed enthusiasms that rock of the “sea of upturned faces.”—Wouldnt it be fierce!–

I’m very seriously worried. My dear Charlotte if I sent you a picture of myself would you promise not to tell that it was your brother. I’d sign it Yours Herbert or Would you? It would give you a “new dignity” and “added prestige” and, Lord, it <’s> what you need. You could put it all over your room mate. Get Amos to send his in tennis flannels, with the inscription

Don’t Forget

Percy

You send me yours: But none of your I’m-content-to-just-be-good-and-let-who-will-be-pretty. If you cant put any smartness into the picture any other way, stick out your tongue.

I’d be ashamed to write such a silly letter to anybody else, but in writing it to you I show my remarkable instinct of adapting my letter to the letteree—even father ought to write you silly letters

So long
Thornybush.

P.S. Its great to be able to draw!

28. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 8 pp. Yale

221 N. Prof St, Oberlin Ohio
April 4 <1916>

<appeared above salutation>

Make this as PRIVET as you think best.

Dearest Papa

Still vacation. I’m feeling very fine this morning after a bath and a hair-cut—I need it I tell you:

Our weather is very changeable; we haven’t had snow for some time but we have days snow-cold and then sunny ones.

I tell you I like vacations. I get up at 7:00 o’clock tho, and go to bed at 9:30, spend a few hours in the library; hang around and talk to people after meals; take my walks and come home and write down what I thought out during the walk. The difference between Vacation and term-time in that respect is that during term-time I only write when I’ve got a red-hot idea, while now I have to make use of my time and sit down and write anyway. You won’t be mad if I tell you about it. The worst thing about Oberlin here is that I have no one to talk it over with. Just out of a kind of necessity I read the thing aloud to Mrs. Orpha Grey, the “elecutionist” down the Hall and to Mrs. Gammon¹⁰⁹ and Theodore Wilder and even Hotchkiss¹¹⁰; but all they do is to laugh at the broadly humorous parts and say “it’s very good,” and make encourageing prophecies! But partly because it’s not a professional printed book, and partly because I’m a freshman they wont take it as more than something I amuse myself with. Ugh.

Miss Grace George a prominent and distinguished New York actress-manager says she’s “looking high and low for an American play” and has offered a large prize for the best play by an undergraduate in an American College. Now I’m such an undergraduate and I write plays as I eat so I feel that without much audacity I ought to be allowed to enter that contrast<contest>. The things against me are that I’m not Harvard, and that I’m not an upperclassmen. I don’t really see why I ought to expect myself to be able to picture “American life” with any big eye, but I’m swimming through the second act, and I want to read it to somebody who can tell me whether its ridiculously immature or not. I’m not worrying about the special details of its construction, I’m probably over-confident that the dialogue’s a paragon of natural vivacity and vividness, and the characters real, and so forth

I often wish that I could plant you impersonally at the foot of my bed and read the thing to you.

I read as much as I had finished a week and a half ago to Prof. Wager, head of the English Department. He thought very highly of it, and confessed to a weakness of being interested in the story and wanted to know how things were going to turn out, wanted me to read it to him as it grew. But: he was sorry that he didn’t see many modern plays—familiar as he was by teaching with the Greek and Elizabethan—and couldn’t quite judge as to the modern atmosphere. I was glad to hear that a “classicist” could enjoy it at all, but wanted someone who knew New York and the Middle West very closely to sit in judgement on the very atmosphere.

The story briefly concerns a young lady of a quiet, old wealthy family in Chicago who suddenly disturbs her family with a violent attack of ideals she has had:

Anabel (in exalted strain, impressively) I’m beautiful; I’m brilliant; I’m rich; what can’t I do?—I will surround myself with famous men and women; I’ll form a new school of literature; a new circle of Art and Music.

Why do I have to stay in a little ugly dark house in Chicago?

I will live in a temple in New York. (challengingly) Now, Phil. (her brother, deeply moved and disturbed, getting up and pacing the floor.) You may be able to do a little along that line, but you mustn’t hope to go very far.

Anabel (to the World!) Why not?

Phil You may not have the personality—the magnetism. I don’t like the idea of your voting yourself into the place.

Anabel But it’s small to be afraid to be conceited. Let me call out again:—I’m beautiful, clever, rich—the new Madame Récamier;

Lady Wortley Montague;¹¹¹ with something of Cleopatra, Sappho—

Mother (shocked) Cleopatra!

Anabel    How little I’ve been until this came! I’ll wear striking gowns in a marvellous house. I’ll be all graciousness, all distinction, all charm. My very ambition will give me dignity I will appear in the public eye; I will learn to speak in public—

Phil    (almost trembling) Stop, Anabel—maybe you can’t do any of these things; and there will be nothing left, but the collossal foolishness—a sentimental schoolgirl—you’ve begun too high.

Anabel     I won’t plan any lower

Phil(burning) If you could! I<f?> you can!

Anabel   You’ll be along with me. You will write it down—the new Boswell—but not my glory—but what my own idealism lends me!

Mother    Well, the hairdresser’s waiting for you upstairs.

End of Act I

In a way its a big idea for a kind of High Comedy. And in Acts II and III we see her in <her> new N.Y. Home “Room of Honor” and her brother—a young fellow who until this came was a Chicago society man, and amateur patron of the arts; we see her, (now named Helena!) receiving her first call from a famous novelist, and trying pathetically to be brilliant and a super-woman, and doing very well. There is an equally important sub-plot woven in, showing her abounding good intentions equally miss-directed.

In the end <the> way<?> of “The Joyous Ventures” fail, where she seems to be most successful, and she retires to a small farmhouse in Illonois. The public misunderstood her principally; she had acted in a tuberculosis-propaganda moving-picture play for them, and the benefit of the Red Cross Society (!), and she had made sincere and good little speeches to working girl leagues and to school-children in Central Park; she had discovered some new philanthropic veins; she had found some artists and poets in Indiana etc, but the dear public thinks she is trying to be notorious instead of lofty, and she becomes a kind of public “hit,” a preacher holds her up as a warning to American girlhood, as the personification of American crudity—and her strength gives out.

But the play is not cynical in holding up the folly of youthful idealism and enthusiasm. The whole answer to the play is in the spirit (not the words) of the conversation on which the final curtain falls. This is between the girl and her brother, in which he coaxes her out <of> her heart’s soreness and brooding and before long they are laughing and playing together in a kind of warm affection, like two young animals,—youth again.¹¹²

I don’t know whether I have entirely misrepresented the thing to you or not. I wish I had you here to give it word for word. I got to go now to lunch!

Lovingly
Thornton

How are you? You’re dear old photograph accidentally got a smudge on it. I must take it and have a photografer remove it. Hein?¹¹³

29. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

221 N. Prof
<Oberlin, Ohio>
Sunday night May ’6 <1916>¹¹⁴

Dear Family,

Nothing especial has happened. I’m being dragged through the trigonometry book. Tues. night comes the very first performance of any serious dramatic work by T.N.W. when “The Last Word about Burglars” and “A Fable for Those who Plague” will be produced before Dascomb Family and friends at a quarter-before-seven. We’ve been rehearsing our heads off. The next week comes the May Festival. We’ve been rehearsing our heads off again.—Such is Life

Tomorrow morning I have to get up before six and take breakfast out at the Arboretum with the New England Club. I couldnt refuse. I had waived going to their dinner about a month ago because I could <not> afford to go alone—to say nothing of asking a New Englander—in. But this is only twenty-cents.

I have grown very fond of Grandmothers present—The Giorgone “Concert”¹¹⁵ and now I have temporarily traded it with another boy for a Corot landscape. This is not a permanent swap. We just want to live with a new picture for a change.

The green fern is doing very well. We’re thinking of getting it a bigger dish. I never was so happy as when I got the photos. Now that I think of it, I’m struck by the fact that I’ve never mentioned receiving these—to say nothing of enjoying them. Isabel’s pastel shows great advance. Try and afford to take her to good exhibitions. We’ve just finished one her<e> with a splendid canvas by Mother’s favorite George Bellow’s.¹¹⁶

Papa’s money I am still carrying around in my mind as open to profitable investment. I think it is just as well if I put it into the daily round of New England Breakfasts, Latin Plays (25c), Church Collections, and Class dues.

I probably told you that I had sworn off sending anything more to the Magazine this <year?>. It is atrociously bad taste to have so many things in succession—a Freshman, too—but Miss Martin came all the way to my boarding-house to beg me for “that little thing about St. Francis of Assisi, that I read to her and her guests once.” I fought fearfully but at last gave in—“Brother Fire: A Comedy for Saints. Three Minute Playlets for Three Persons, No V.” One of the few short things I’ve written while in Oberlin.

The Big One is almost done.¹¹⁷ One conversation at the end of the Fourth and last Act is left and then I’ll be glad. I have no regrets at parting with these people’s company. The typiste has begun already. I’ve suddenly discovered that she’s too expensive and I’m going to shake her off at the end of the Second Act.

Lots of love to Everybody
Thorntony

30. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

You know where
<Oberlin, Ohio>
May 14—<19>’16.

Dear Papa,

The majestic contract for my valuable labor I return signed.¹¹⁸ I suppose its what’s called an efficiency document. I really am very glad to have my work organized. With the Dutton housework it was—“You can do this next if you want to.” and all my work was an extravagant favor to the family. But this admirable paper says I’m to get up at this dot and report to work at this dot, and submit myself to Mr. Dot this; and refrain from profanity on this dot. I hope my Mr. Dot isn’t the pretentious, upright reformer that got up the sheet.

Did you know that you were doing what the psychologists call “infringing on my personality” when you ask me to sign a blank agreement in which you fill in the details. You have impaired my self:consciousness when I am told that you bound me over to 9 hours a day; made inroads on my “mental acceptance of conditions of living” when I see that my term of labor is ten weeks.

So Watch Your Step

I really think you’ve solved the problem very well for yourself but as for the men who want me to milk Mt. Hermon cows, or stack Northfield Hay, or “carry on the work which Mr. Moody began”¹¹⁹—well, I suppose your attitude is They Should Worry.

I don’t like the idea of getting money. And I don’t believe in your speaking of it “as a work I have had some experience in”. If you don’t be very careful—and you know I’m going to major in Psychology at Oberlin—you’ll find that the Spirit of Wishing on <has> been painting pictures on the unstained Walls of Truth, in your mind.

So Watch Your Step

I’ve got a room mate for next year. Mr. Walter Smith of Dascomb. I’ve always liked him for a quiet concientious and clever-minded boy. He’s no Alexander like Mr. Spore, but he’s very good solidity for daily wear. He just beat our religiously-sentimental, chaplain all to nothing in a gloriously funny argument on whether God underwent change at all. The chaplain had a vague idea that God underwent everything, so he would relinquish his right to a change (not-withstanding the old text.) But Walter Smith proved something like Time is fluid change, embodied in the super-intellect—of course I can’t carry it any further, and I haven’t even got the subject of the debate right, but you’re impressed anyway. Walter Smith is the one I exchange pictures with so you can see he has taste. He both teaches Geometry at the Academy and urges me to borrow his beloved copy of Theocritus.

Lots of love
Thorny Bush.

The date I signed that thing was the 14^th. I didn’t know whether to leave it to the next signer or not

31. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

221 N. Prof St Oberlin <Ohio>
May 18—<19>’16

Dear Old Isabel,

This is to thank you in person for the pastel of Lac Leman¹²⁰—and its really all kinds of improvement—and to enclose t<w>o more Oberlin poster stamps. You might be interested in the program, too; I know the boy quite well, he can’t compose worth a bean but he can argue and argue as long as I want.

I’m glad you’re going to Chataqua.¹²¹ I’m getting afraid that your being kept at the same age as you look, and that would never do. I advise you to do two things to make yourself feel more grown up: open your mouth wide when you talk, and let the words be long and full of real grown-up bluff-talk without wrinkling your forehead, or lisping or smiling—just stare mother in the face, and say “Did they guarantee the poppy seeds?” or “I’ve just discovered that my stationary has a translucent water-mark.”

Always know more than you’re saying. When you tell Janet to put on a shall<shawl> over her head you must be thinking to yourself “Now I’m using the imitative instinct; and when I make her walk in step, I’ve got her attention just that much more because I’m using her sense of rhythm.” It’s really time you felt terribly conscious of your towering height over Janet. I say again I’m getting terribly afraid that your getting into the kind of girl, who is so behind hand that when she’s with people she’s so busy just wondering and being bewildered that she’s no time to slap other people’s faces and generally make herself felt.

I like your letters very much. Next time tho, don’t even stop to form the letters. A young lady just runs across the polished floor to her shining desk, throws it open and dashes off a note, as tho she were drawing a cartoon; then she licks it, pounds it to make it stick and calmly places it in the mail-box and the thing—the little chance trifling thing is over.

I’ll be home soon; and then I’ll have to act wilder than I feel like doing, so I can scare you, and push you and worry <you> into a real modern storming young woman.

Maybe you are after all, tho’.

What?

Thorny Bush.

32. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 8 pp. Yale

May 20—<19>16
221 N. Prof St.
<Oberlin, Ohio>

Dear Mother only—¹²²

There are lots of things to tell—stark stiff things—but I have a mood to communicate first and the things need not be too sure of an appearance;—for when one has disclosed a mood, a feeling one is so proud that one goes to bed and snores with an undercurrent of brazen triumph.

There is a senior at Dascomb named Ruth Keller. She is majoring in Latin, and knows the latin poets very well. She is taking Italian and reads Dante. But she does not mix with the other girls very well, partly because she has a reserve of her own and partly because she spends so much time studying hard,—a grind. But I have come to know her very well, and I am the only one that really knows what a delightful, colored personality she has. I try to explain it to Mr. Spore—who is too nice to demand of me why I “sit out” with that large old grind—but he can’t see it. And I ask Miss Tritschler whether she sees ever—just a glimpse of it.

But they’d see it alright if Miss Keller were pretty. But she is not. I must be remorseless in describing her. She is “large”—I used to think that her face looked a vulgar italian—the kind with little curls greasily fringeing the forehead. But now I know she is like a handsome Roman matron. Part of her air of reserve comes from the height at which she holds her head, and the classic severity of her mouth. But to give the public’s opinion of her I must return to the remorseless details. When she has an evening dress on, in charity one must refuse to notice the large arms, and the unbalanced neck. She maintains an upright retirement at table—she will not laugh at the foolish teasing that is the greater part of table conversation here,—she busies her self conscientiously in seeing that the waiters bring enough for the boys to eat, but apart from that she refuses to enter into the hilarity. Except when I am there—and Miss Parker places me at her table very often, since I am the only person she is at home with. Then we two exclude the whole table and talk about anything we darn please.

But when we are together she is like a little girl; we’re both willing to laugh at the humblest and most ridiculous joke in the world. Or else we’re as sober as reformers. The other day we had a long walk in which we discussed what she was going to do next year and then on. She’s going to teach Latin in the High School of her hometown, New Kensington, Penn. She’ll do it alright, of course, but she needs a lot more than that to keep her living. She gets great fits of perfect despair with herself—her not being able to be one girl among many, and her not being at least on ordinary friendly terms with the boys;—its all the tragedy of not being pleasing and beautiful. I told her that she had to find something to do hard out of school times. She can’t just live at home in her flat with her mother talking and sewing and gossiping. And I was thinking so hard of the awful folly of Miss Hanna and Miss Day¹²³ that I must have been little short of eloquent. I told her she must always be forcing herself to read good things she didn’t want to read and join Women’s Clubs she didn’t want to join and spending money on concerts and plays she didn’t want to spend just to keep herself from thinking that she was living a full life, as a teacher. I took as an example the concert of the May Festival the night before, where we had sung the “Nuova Vita” of Dante. She had gone—altho she hardly ever goes to “anything” and had thot it very beautiful. She saw that if she kept seeing and reading things like that she would feel different than if she just stayed in a rut.

The next morning she said with a little laugh that she’d hardly been able to sleep at all.

Wouldn’t it have been a wonderful thing if I had really at least put a disturbing influence into a potential Miss Hanna?

Another thing is that there is a young man, a Mr. Howard, who writes to her very often. He came down to see her the other day and I happened to see them. He was a spruce young man, very attentive to her. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I know for one thing that he’s not attentive to her because he sees her charm too. She says he doesn’t do anything—he just drifts—he’s quite wealthy. I asked her why she didn’t make him get down to something like work. Oh—she was vague about it—“it couldn’t be done, he was just born that way.”

“Oh well,” I told her, “you’re just the kind that would work and slave yourself to death, just so such a man wouldn’t have to lift a finger.”

She repudiated the idea with indignant laughter.—But today she told me that she had changed her mind<.> She wasn’t going to send him an invitation to her graduation after all. Now imagine what it means to a neglected girl like her to hold off a nice young <man>. ¶ won’t say the whole affair is a case for Strindberg—poor girl.¹²⁴

This afternoon almost all the rest of Dascomb was down to the lake. I talked it over with her, and said I was afraid I couldn’t afford to go. If I didn’t go it meant that she didn’t go for there’s no one else in the house who couples off with her. “She was glad she wasn’t going—she had to study.”

We went to the library to study for an hour and a half and then we were to go out <remainder of letter missing>

Wilder men in New Haven, 1915 or 1916. Left to right: Amos N., Amos P (sitting), and TNW.

Wilder men in New Haven, 1915 or 1916. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

33. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

c/o The Mt. Hermon
School, Mass
July 2—<19>’16.

Dear Mother,

By tomorrow evening I will have completed two weeks of work. I am becoming used to the deeficulty of the work—used that is not so much to doing it physically as to accepting it with resignation mentally; my fatalism increases with my blisters.

I suppose father has told you that I earn 15 cents an hour and work ten hours a day, and sixty a week. I was a little pleased at the thought of nine dollars a week (although that is very low wages), when suddenly a Portia¹²⁵ stretched out her hand and announ<c>ed with or without blood four dollars was to be deducted from my living wage to cover board, room, light and laundry. I now see that the earning of money is degrading to the spirit of man; such avarice and greed is growing in me that I can plainly see that before long I will be getting up early with some of the other “workers” in order to grind out a few more fifteen cent’s before the sun rises. I hope to come home Saturday, July the twenty-ninth, or else go up to the Duttons for that weekend.

I get in about an hour and a half of reading every evening. By that time I am so tired that everything that I read which is beautiful or impressive finds tears in my eyes! This phenomenon in turn reacts to even deeper emotion; farm life would make the weeping philosopher of Syracuse out of me.¹²⁶ So far I have endamped the pages of “Hedda Gabler” “The Master Builder” “Boswell’s etc” and the “Religio Medici.”¹²⁷ There is a very interesting paper on “My Street” by that Earnest Poole in the July Century.¹²⁸

You will be surprised to hear that the boy I often hay beside is a cousin of Miss Eleanor Hague. He is a freshman from Washington and Jefferson College, Penn. quondam Mt. Hermon.

Amos telephoned my boss from Northfield this noon with orders for me to stay in my room since he is bring<ing> over a “cousin” of mine. I suspect its Mr. Peabody. It can’t be Max! can it?¹²⁹¶ You ought to be glad that I can only write to you on these slow resty Sundays. Father gets the frantic mid-week ones; tho’ I must say they don’t seem to disturb at all—he’s positively pleased by them, the complacent one!—Tell Isabel to assume this duty on her heart: Find somewhere to hand in my room the packet of my bookplates. Enclose one to me. The waiter at my table is going to start putting himself thru Harvard next year with a printing press, and I want to show him something in his line that he never heard of—something Harvardiensian, too.

Affty Thornton.

34. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

July 11 <1916> c/o Mt. Hermon School,
Mass.

Dear Amos,

I am very sorry to find you in so low a mind and I don’t know what to do. I agree with you that the prospect of the time involved, the weeks and days, is more discourageing than the separate duties. I myself however can see how I came to my present attitude of philosophical stoicism from positive frenzy and I hope that you will come, too. The principal alleviations of my life have been the evenings, my reading and my thoughts. I am sure that you have as beautiful a place as this, altho’ you may not have the last hours of the day free to enjoy it as I have. But steal an hour from sleep if necessary and walk along the sides of some pond or brook. And try to get a little reading in.

I will send you the “Religio Medici” which is a “devotional” book but written in the most exquisite style. The marks are father’s and refer to the sentiments not the style. The discussions of the supernatural especially are written in the most stunning eloquence I ever read. My chief interest here however has been Boswell’s Life of Johnson which I read every hour I can. I’d send it to you—only it weighs a ton. I am often able to be by myself “hoeing a row” or “turning the hay” and look forward to such jobs as chances to think over everything and anything.

Please do not think me any the less sincere because of the frightful wording of this letter. All this stiffness is the sign that Boswell has me all over. I see myself writing down a archaism, or latin construction and I have to howl at myself, but I cannot help it. My style will either come out from this ordeal saved or ruined. Wash out your eyes, remember that life’s a kind of illusion and this pain and dis-ease is merely funny—and that you are tenderly loved by

Thornton N. Wilder

35. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Sunday Morning July 16 <1916>
Mt. Hermon School.

Dear Papa,

I have begun to take an unusual pleasure in writing letters. I suppose that in spite of my fatigue I have found time to write as many letters in my short time here as in months of Oberlin time. You must confess that you have received many, besides which I have written several and divided them among Mother, Amos, Mr. Spore, Prof Wager and Ruth Keller, my classical friend. But it might grow to a danger to talk about letters as such, so I will stop.

The grounds today are covered by a thousand plus of old Hermonites. Last night they held a faculty reception on the lawn and afterwards until late into the night they tramped around like a herd of cattle, giving yells and spelling words to the tramp of their feet: H-E-R-M-O-N, D-L-M-O-O-D-Y. They all show that the prep school can leave a tremendous impression but they are a dissappointing crowd. Their faces are heavy and they stand and walk hideously. A great many are oily, repressed and apologetic, some are stout and have pockets showing a battery of sausage-like cigars, and give the picture of a Senator from Kansas. Their wives are unusually secondary because they are visiting a men’s school and a men’s reunion. The whole crowd has cheapened itself by wearing huge blue circular tags with their names on. I cannot but remember the more enlightened masquerade on the New Haven campus, altho’ I suspected there that the cheer and life of the occasion owed something to translucent bottles and a barrel swishing as it was lifted onto the table. At the dining-hall during supper last night I discovered these alumni to be of the kind who strike their plates with their knives when supper is delayed; and signify applause by beating on the table cloth with the handles of their forks. Nevertheless I have seen much better stuff in the present graduating class and conjecture that the religious pressure in this school finds out the best students & sends them to the foreign field while the rest—who are considered as corn that did not pop, a necessary surplus—return to their farms unlighted.

My friend Sibley from Chefoo, a fine boy, hopes to go to China soon, is in this graduating class of eighty boys. I forgot to mention altho you probably guessed it that this is a reunion of Ford cars as well. The banquet—workers invited too—is Monday evening—do but picture the enthusiasm!—I see the toastmaster is a Wilfred Fry of Philadelphia. Isn’t there a famous Chinese art-connaiseur of Philad. named Fry, too?—I hope not Wilfred, tho!

All these Captains & Kings depart Tues. night and leave the wearied worker to take up his regular meal hours and routine.

Now that I’ve vented my spleen I’ll sign my name. This crew has turned my stomach more than the food and the dirty room and the cheap attempts at disgustingness of my would-be sophisticated fellow workers.

Ugh!

Thornton.

P.S. I honestly thot I was going to write a nice letter but the cat got out of the bag.

36. TO RUDOLF KOMMER.¹³⁰ ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Monhegan Maine!¹³¹). Princeton

Men’s Building
Oberlin, Ohio.
Sept. 15—<19>16

Dear Mr. Kommer,

I am back at College and about to start in work again. Two of the courses that all Sophomores are required to take I will find very hard. These are Economics and Chemistry. I am not afraid of the rest, though: Exposition and Essay-Writing, “Classics in Translation”, and a short history course in English Institutions and the Reformation. My father is having me add to this a little work with the organ in the Conservatory of Music. In all I have tried to see to it that I have plenty of time to myself outside. During the service in which the new Senior class was inaugurated yesterday afternoon the Parsifal music was played. I was reminded of the last time I heard the Motif of the Holy Graal, at the close of that great evening.¹³²

I thought for a while that the picture you drew of living in a city and mixing in with the “newest thought” would make little old Oberlin look mild for me. But I think I am too much of an American, and a middle-westerner—to ever really go in for the Continental Method in earnest. Perhaps you can explain my mind in the matter to me?

I had two days in Boston on my way back. My mother always told me how great an actress Mary Shaw was in “Ghosts” and so I thought a play in which she appeared could not be altogether lost. Such awful stuff as “The Melody of Youth” I never saw, and as for Miss Shaw, all she did was to lift her hand and make her points, and then stare at the audience.¹³³ How much better it would have been to have gone to “Hit-the-Trail-Holliday” which was my only other choice.¹³⁴

I couldn’t find Eulenberg’s “Schattenphantasie”¹³⁵ in the great Boston Public Library itself. I’ll have our local library send to Washington for it.

I am overhauling the Dr. Johnson-Boswell affair.¹³⁶ When I re-read the thing it struck me hard how excellent your suggestions were. I hope I can follow them appropriately.

As for the assault on Grace George—“The Rocket; an American Comedy in Four Acts”—my father says he’ll send it to me in a week. He’s been making marginal comments on it that it’ll take me a week to erase. His point-of-view is “antipodal” to yours.

I am very interested in Mr. Strunsky’s play.¹³⁷ Please let me know if it reaches anywhere. Could you let me know the name and mold of it? “Young writers live with most enthusiasm on books they have not read; pictures they have not seen; scores they have not heard.”

Wish me well with my Chemistry, as I do for your piece. I am bound to you for much encouragement and many new ideas—difficult to assimilate!—

Sincerely yours
Thornton N. Wilder

P.S. Do you want to see my book-plate?

Funny, Hien<Hein>?

37. TO CHARLOTTE E. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

<appeared above salutation>

Use Spacing and Deep Margin’s Elegantly.

October 16—<19>16
Men’s Bldg Oberlin.

Great Scott, Charlotte

I never saw such impudence in my whole life. Just because a person pretends to show you a little deference, you feel you have to write your own obituary, and open shop as a patron of belles-lettres. When I read your gentle strictures my eyes popped out of my sockets, and when I came to your favorable comments I felt as tho I were being stabbed from behind. As I read my manuscript I began to miss some of my cherished phrases; every now and then I saw that someone had inserted perfunctory bridges over which the timid mind might step—with petticoat lifted = when the art of writing is a matter of alpine climbing—peak to peak, and let the chasms snatch the fearful.

However the mistake was mine to attempt expository prose in which I wasn’t over-interested. Now, Madam, I am sending something, if you touch a curl of which you shall surely die. The very rhythm of the sentence is important and if you supply a polite “over which” or “wherefore” the web will fall. I trust that you are in a better position to enter into the confusion of mythologies in the Revival of Learning, than improvisation.

Send me your magazine; and I will send you mine. My contribution is not an article and so your search for signs of illiteracy are entirely beside the point. A sweet pale girl on the magazine staff came to me and said: “After we read your story for the magazine we sat there perfectly silent, it was so beautiful.”¹³⁸ I won’t expect any such effect upon you until you are “educated in reverence” but you shall eat your words someday!

Lovingly Thornton.

P.S.I Why don’t you go to France as a nurse or a hay-maker or streetcar conductor?

P.S.II My hair is still white and curled from reading your letter. Why the idea! I hope you have removed all the poison from your system. Oh, most incredible venom, Judicatrix incredibilis, quouseque tandem abutere nostra patientia!¹³⁹

38. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Men’s Buildg. Oberlin, Ohio.
Oct. 22—<19>16.

PRIVATE

Dear Mother,

I suppose I have to be very tactful in my letters these days. Amos’ going away has intoxicated you and Papa so with swelling emotions that letters from oberlin will surprise you by their thinness. Soon letters will be coming to you from Red Cross hospitals with censor-stamps on the back and Papa will feel that at last he has a son in the foreign field; how relentlessly I am shown up by it all—a minor who doesn’t study hard and who needs money from time to time.¹⁴⁰

So read my letters with charity. Few other mothers have sons where your’s is but many have sons where your other is!

I told you that while I was at Hermon Mr. Wager wrote me that he had a subject to treat if I could. Well, its il gran tradimente ([The Great Betrayel” (?)] of the Baglioni family of Perugia.¹⁴¹<)> It’s a superb affair but would be too ambitious for me. Did you know anything of it?

I went to see Elsie Ferguson.¹⁴² It was a most lovely performance. The play is light but not negligable. Her peculiar voice and walk brought back the Outcast continually but throughout this play she is for the most part happy And such acting in the graceful or tender moments.

With all my new clothes I feel like a new person and I can hardly go back to wearing my old overcoat. I’ve had it ever since Chefoo days in and out. Its a perfect give-away in texture and shape. However I could recall St. Francis’ vow of Poverty and wear it another year if necessary. You write me privately your own secret and inner opinion of father’s money state and tell me whether it would be adding the last straw to an impossible load if I presented the question to him. He himself recognized the fact that it was a “wierd” garment when he was last here but has probably forgotten it. Don’t feel any hesitation will crush me. I am quite often surprised by evidences that I have a little pleasant “prestige”; it can help me “live down” lots.

This afternoon I saw Leonard Peabody¹⁴³ and called on Latin Professor Lord. Mrs. Lord is a wealthy and very beautiful lady. They have a handsome home. Mr. Lord has been to Europe about twelve times and their rooms are full of old furniture and beautiful painting reproductions.

Often I’m dissatisfied and unhappy; I want to leave college and live on a Desert Island. Would it cost much?—Everything beautiful I read or hear reminds me that I ought to be finished with all this and be at it. But I have finished a beautiful new 3-minute that Charlotte’s typewriting for me.¹⁴⁴

Lots of love to Isabel; I have more fellow-feeling for her with her Algebra than with Father and his Gratified Wish

Love Thornton—.

39. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Men’s Bldg, Oberlin Ohio
Nov 13—<19>16
On this day the exquisite Nell Gwyn died and R.L.S. was born—or vice versa.¹⁴⁵

Dear Mama,

There is considerable to tell you (and all interested) today. I recognize with a rueful smile that it is some time since I last wrote. I shall bind up my thoughts into sheaves as usual in order to conceal the lack of unity. This letter will be a little more cheerful than usual because it is Monday morning and during the weekends I have time to take long walks and forget how far behind in Laboratory work and in the Major Prophets I am. Besides I am met on every hand with congratulation on—

Saturday night the Latin Department presented a metrical translation of Plautus’ “Menaechmi.”¹⁴⁶ I had the role of Peniculus, the Sponge, the Parasite. I had a light beard the color of fried apples and a red nose. We acted in front of a picturesque Roman street and the play was happily over-flowing with the customs and manners of Ancient Roman Bourgouisie.

The Oberlin Magazine has at last appeared with my Saint’s Story. I hope Papa will like it. The whole issue is I think better than any last year. The George Ade affair is by Robert Watson my little tenor boy. It has three acute moments, but is swamped in the banal¹⁴⁷

My new overcoat is thick and warm and only seventeen dollars. Both Mrs. Gammon and Agnes¹⁴⁸ felt obliged to come down and see the launching. The only real joys and fears are those I experience in Whitney and Hill’s.

Mr. Rudolf Kommer, to whom I sent “the Rocket” put himself out to write me a long letter. Most of the letter was analysis of the play for my own good but he said many nice things too. My letter had followed him to c/o The German Consulate, Los Angeles. Altho “I was very excited over the proclamation of the new Kingdom of Poland, which would not mean much to you, I sat right down and read your play.” So I am tangled among the intrigues of german diplomatists. He thinks that Oberlin is on his way back and wants to get a glimpse, “a real glimpse,” of such a college. I welcomed him to Oberlin with reserved gladness—I don’t know what on earth would attract so perfect a flower of Vienna—but he can come if he likes. I added tactfully enough, to give me good warning so that I could put my cell in to unwonted Monastery neatness, and arrange with the Dean to throw off the unvarnished harness, and to meet him at the cross-roads.

It will be curious. I shall insist on his going to Church and Chapel to hear the choirs.

Prof. Wager couldn’t meet his classes on Sat. because of hoarseness and he didn’t come down to the doorbell on Sunday. I hope he isn’t worse. I am a correspondent of Mrs. Wager’s—who is away at the bedside of her father who is failing of Bright’s Disease in New Jersey—and I feel responsible! Oh, he’s the most wonderful man.

Do start reading the last series of your Edith Sidgwick.¹⁴⁹ Begin with A Lady of Leisure. Then there are Duke Jones and the Accolyte. Most brilliant dialogue, charming characters! all in memoriam H. J.

Lots of Love Thornton.

40. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

M.B. Oberlin, Ohio.
Nov. 14—<19>16

Dear Papa,

There is no reason why I should feel so comfortable and happy this evening. Heaven knows I was all at sea during Chemistry class this morning and that I handed in a paper more remarkable for substance than form to Exposition-and-Essay-Writing class this afternoon. But after that I practiced sturdily and with surprising absorption at the organ for fifty minutes, then paid a call on the lonely wretched Mr. Carr my ex-Trigrometry teacher. In a veiled way he exposes his distraught shy life and his dissatisfactions. I’m the only person he knows in the town, for all his many classes and his talkitive blind-headed aunt; and again Heaven knows that of a necessity he must be a post script in my life. This may sound very sketchy and imaginative on paper but when you come I can amass evidence—the tragi-comedy details of the poor young man’s sensitiveness. The strange thing is that with him I am clear almost curt, with a cross-examination manner, but I in turn “lean” and am drawn out—sometimes on the very same evening by the Man in the Old Brick House.

After the heartrending interview with Mr. Carr I went to supper. I’ll make no bones of saying that I am developing into a kind of Breakfast-table Kaiser. I insist on dominating! I become educative. I call them up short when they utter bromides. I demand that one of them read a certain magazine story that throws light on herself and report to me. (And they do.) I ask them what they thought of the Chapel service and then disagree with them noisily. I insist on giving them informations I have extracted from the Encyclopoedias so that they can go to the Concert and listen intelligently. To put it short—I see you in myself and laugh, and then go on exagerating what I saw.

So I enjoyed a fictitious importance at the supper table and then returned to the Men’s Bldg. I spend some time in visits in boys’ rooms. ¶ Not long ago I had a long talk with Mr. Wager. Usually our talks are ornamental both e- and al- lusive. But in this one he directed his fine subtlety on me and before long I had spread myself shivering all over the place. Drawing richly from his own experience he put me together again with just enough appreciative pats to start me off. The effect may seem remote from the cause but now it is observed that I can stand in the door of any boy’s room and be greeted normally and be asked to come again and be “cussed” at and joked with. And not only this but the Dissector laid it on me that I should be able to get all this but more—that by my inherited personality (that’s one for you!) and by the associations I carry in College I ought to bring out the idealler strains—

As he put it it was transendentally beautiful and winning and I have started life over again as it were. I always thot that I was constitutionally disgusting to all men. But now I know I have four friends among the Philistines where before I had one. And I do like them more and more. There are two men on the football team itself that pass the campus gossip with me in the gentlest amiability. I will always say that Prof. Wager did half but my new coat did the other half.

After these calls among a strange but charming nation, I drew up my rocking-chair before my murmuring radiator and read into Jeremiah for class tomorrow. At 9:30 I took up a brisk walk out in the cold (our first snow-fall today!) When I came home I drew up my chair again in my own blessed happy room, and a feeling of such contentment stole up my shoes from the steel-purring-stand that I was determined that I would write an untroubled letter to the Atlas of my sphere

So Lots of Love
Thornton.

Can you forgive the ego? I’m a sophomore—but well-born.

41. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

<Oberlin, Ohio>
Nov. 23—<19>16.

Dear Mother I may have complained of lack of time last year but it was mere illusion compared to this year. I have almost literally no afternoons. On Monday I have Economics lecture at 3: to 4:00, Tues. a class until three and organ practice from four to five, Wednesday, laboratory from 3 to 4:30 cutting into my organ time which ends at five; Thursday like Tues. Friday, lab. from 1:30-4:30. Sat. I have to come back early from my walk to take up the organ at four. Today I was lying down when the two o’clock class bell rang and immediately through my head ran a string of excuses I might offer the Dean for absence, but I went.

I take every measure however to fence off the week-end from the routine. Sat. afternoon I walk as many miles to the east or west as I dare. I don’t go to the football games. Sunday I walk again; I don’t go to Church very often<;> if I do I go in the evening or Vespers in the afternoon. Monday morning I take my walk again.

I am getting to dread the week. I put off a serious consideration of my studies until Wednesday morning; and I take liberties with study requirements on Friday.

But I have really done a good deal of original writing this year. The best has been the Saint Story in the Magazine and a 3-minute playlet called “Proserpina and the Devil” for Marionettes. And a “Masque of the Bright Haired” for the Red Headed Club = “Order of the Golden Fleece” they call themselves.¹⁵⁰ I shall send this Masque to Percy MacKaye since it is his line—reminding him of the ridiculous urchin during the rehearsals of Antigone.¹⁵¹

I have collaborated with Miss Marion Tyler the brightest and most charming girl in College (slim and great dark eyes with quaint embroidered things on her dark dresses; shy but vivid.) in writing two essays and a one-act play for the market. I supply some purple patches and general ideas, she adds some more ideas and reduces the whole to structure. One of these is a curious mystico-religious fantasy, the other, called “Stones at Nell Gwyn” is a defense of Nell and Catullus and Earnest Dowson and Villon etc—that kind of person! The Play is for the Washington Square Players and is unique. It is about the China coast!¹⁵²

Lots of Love
Thornton.

Mention me regularly to Janet; speak cheer of me to Father; let Isabel think me not unromantic; bless me when the westerly wind blows.

42. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Men’s Bldg, Oberlin, O.
<Fall(?) 1916>

Dear Papa,

I received your money. $16 of it will have to go out immediately in Room-rent. With the $4 which I have now I imagine I can last ’til the new year. You have a way of not being open about money matters that is perfectly harrowing for us. With great solemnity you hope that we can do the college year under $550 and then express delight that we were able to; of course you didn’t expect we could. You ask me to get a coat between sixteen and eighteen dollars, but in your heart of hearts you expect it will be twenty-two. Just because Amos and I have been so minutely brought up we comply to the letter when our whole life and thought would be happier if we could feel proud of working out our own economies on our own money. Money and money-matters will be the last end of our family anyway. Poor mother has almost been robbed of her mind by worry over money; she can get so wrought up over the price of a pair of shoes that she is intellectually nil for a week. You are secretive and furtive about it; you may sometime become suspicious and injured. I hate to ask for money or talk about it, and so I drag on for weeks without soap or equally absurd details just because I feel that money is such an oppressive difficult thing.

The first thing St. Francis of Assisi thought about was poverty. When he changed from his old life to the new he ran naked out of his father’s house. A lovely girl at about the time of the reformation had mystical visions and was in terror of the integrity of her soul because her parents were forcing a distasteful marriage upon her. So she planned to run away. She took up a penny saying “This will buy me bread at noonday.” But she felt hindered as she ran. At last she threw it away and was happy. When money grips you at the throat the only thing to do is to read these old stories. We cannot give up everything for the comforts of poverty in our home We have been so settled in respectability. You must retain “position”, mother must retain “appearance” and at college we must “appear well.” The position of a farmer is only happy in this way. But not today. He must send his daughter to school; his sense of emulation pushes him to vie with the passersby. Besides no farmer ever recognized himself that he had at hand opportunities for a perfect spiritual life; they long to take on the cares we trudge about with. A missionary in chinese clothes in remotest Szechuen province is the free-est state I can imagine. But very likely his religious beliefs there are anything, but spiritual. They are full of the ten commandments, and the Christian austerities.

When you say with your sober manner “I hope that no Wilder will fail in class” you are saying more than you feel again. You were surprised that I did not fail last year. You honestly expected it. How much happier and free-er it would be for me if I only had to live up to what you really expected, instead of what you professed. I suppose I should be thankful that you’re not as demanding and exacting as you sometimes sound. You like to make little German drives against chance evidences of impracticality that I leave around, but you know that if I weren’t that way I wouldn’t love you with the kind of love I love you with. I don’t love you with a patriarchal bond like Amos, or like a rebel, secretly in eternal debt to your patience, like Charlotte or Isabel’s shy acknowledgement of your felicity in talking to her best nature. I don’t know how I do love you, but I know the edges of the ocean, the impatience with your solicitousness, your overemphasis of the rigid necessity of being moral and “good”; when there’s really such licence allowed to personality to do honorably such unspeakably un-moral things. Now do confess that to be glad and aspiring and intimate makes “being a Christian” and doing one’s iron duty and “weeping over the unsaved” negligable. So don’t ask me to pass all my classes; cultivate oneself like a rose-tree and poverty—the end—will burn you in the end with the greater trees—But you were a rose-tree. Well its probably not clear, but never mind. Its well meant

Thornton

43. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Oberlin O—
Jan 11, <19>’17.

Dear Papa,

You are often urging me to devote myself to my studies, but you do not say how far. Beyond a certain point I could gain nothing by close study. What I won in discipline would be balanced by what I lost in “integrity of temperament.” There are higher goods in pursuits consistent to oneself than in reaping iron flowers in a foreign field. Should I by a (hypothetical) self-control force myself after hours of work into a student I should be like those whom Pascal describes as going to Mass, and going to Mass, until they at last find themselves Christians, “making animals of themselves.”¹⁵³ ¶ I do not pretend yet to have reached the point where the equilibrium of gain through discipline and loss through integrity balances itself, but I have at times overleaped it, and been wretched.

Why we should go to College at this time of our life it is hard to see. Our minds are in a ferment; we cannot realize an idea; or imagine a conviction. Art, sex and religion are driving us mad, and time or mood for reflection we have none. There are long periods, sometimes a whole week when I am so miserable because I cannot think of a beautiful thing to write that I seem to <be> beating my head in despair again<st> a stone wall. Sometimes when the din and voices of these years of my life become too insistent, I say:

“Come, I’ll stop all this. I’ll not try to answer anything, or right anything or aspire <to> anything. I will be an ordinary boy; I will eat and study and wash and be full of polite attentions to other people. Then after a few months I will come back to this inner room, and perhaps I being older can put it in order.”

But within a few hours something has happened: someone has spoken, or glanced or snow has fallen and I am up in the air again.

I cannot tell whether I suffer from this restlessness more than other boys or not. We all conceal it, and from our parents first of all. But College is not an answer to it—not Oberlin with its fat Christian optimism.

I want either to go to Harvard next year where life is handled in the idiom of art instead of YMCA. I am sick of Affirmations.

Or else I want to go and live on Monhegan. Even during the winter. Perhaps a year until all this fever is over, and I have grown up, or grown stiff or whatever it is that allows one to accept the world, and be content with a life of Houses and dinners lived on a life of Dreams and Cries. Why should there be such a tremendous and pressing apparatus of Bricks and Vegetables and Clothes and Calling-Cards on what they insist is a life only for the Spirit?

Lovingly
Thornton