NOTE

Chapter 1

1 TNW’s maternal grandmother (1847-1923).

2 The First Congregational Church. Amos (1895—1993) was TNW’s older brother.

3 Thornton MacNess Niven III (1876—1943), younger of TNW’s mother’s two brothers.

4 Sir Philip “Ben” Greet (1857—1936), English actor and impresario, who toured North America with spare productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

5 The Greek Theatre was given to the University of California by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst in 1903; TNW saw many rehearsals and performances there. The Mass in B Minor was performed there on April 22, 1909; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra appeared there on April 26; and the Ben Greet Players performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream there on May 1 and The Tempest on May 8.

6 TNW’s father (1862-1936) was consul general in Shanghai at this time. TNW’s mother, Isabella Niven Wilder (1873-1946), and her five children lived in Berkeley.

7 TNW’s youngest sister (1910-1994).

8 Christmas Oratorio (Oratorio de Noël), by French composer Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns.

9 The second of TNW’s younger sisters (1900-1995).

10 Theodore Wilder (1897-1985), the elder of two sons of Dr. and Mrs. George D. Wilder; Dr. Wilder was an American medical missionary in Tehsien and his wife was a teacher. They were not related to TNW’s family.

11 In late 1910, a pneumonic plague epidemic broke out in north China and the port near the Chefoo schools was quarantined. Anyone who had to leave the school wore a mask soaked in disinfectant.

12 TNW sometimes added accents in titles or names that did not have such.

13 French: “Do you speak German, sir?”

14 The Wilder children’s nurse, Margaret (“Aunt”) Donoghue.

15 TNW’s brother’s birthday was September 18.

16 Sherman D. Thacher (1861—1931), founder and headmaster of the Thacher School.

17 The Scarlet Pimpernel was written by Baroness Emma Orczy (1865-1947).

18 Athenian general and politician who, because he switched allegiances during the Peloponnesian War, was finally marginalized in Greek affairs.

19 In Parallel Lives, by Plutarch, the careers of prominent Greek and Roman statesmen and generals are presented mainly in contrasting pairs. Two editions for children were F.J. Gould’s Tales of the Romans: The Children’s Plutarch (1910) and F.J. Gould’s Tales of the Greeks: The Children’s Plutarch (1910).

20 TNW’s oldest sister (1898-1980).

21 Herodotus wrote a history of the Persian Wars; Xenophon was the author of Anabasis and Hellenica, which continued the history of the Peloponnesian War; Thucydides wrote the most famous history of the Peloponnesian War.

22 The volume of Kipling’s short stories to which TNW is referring may be Rewards and Fairies (1910).

23 William Lyon “Billy” Phelps was a professor of English at Yale University. A close family friend of the Wilders, he had been TNW’s mother’s Sunday school teacher at her father’s church in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

24 Molly Make-Believe (1910), best-selling novel by American novelist Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (1872-1958).

25 S.S. Mongolia was the ship that TNW, his mother, and his sisters took from San Francisco to Shanghai in December 1910.

26 Sir Walter Scott.

27 Song for solo voice and piano, based on a poem by Goethe.

28 “Alice Where Art Thou?”: a song for solo voice and piano by Dutch composer Joseph Ascher (1829-1869).

29 Italian: My Dear Lady.

30 “A house divided against itself cannot stand” is the most famous line from Abraham Lincoln’s June 16, 1858, speech at the Republican State Convention in Springfield, Illinois, where he accepted the nomination to run against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas for the U.S. Senate. The line paraphrases Matthew 12:25 and/or Mark 3:25.

31 In October 1911, a mutiny broke out among army troops against the ruling Manchu dynasty. By the end of the year, the Manchu regent had been deposed and his representative had begun negotiations in Nanking, where the provisional revolutionary republican government had been established.

32 TNW’s maternal aunt Charlotte Tappan Niven (1882-1979).

33 TNW’s father was on home leave in the United States and visited his son Amos in California before going to Madison, Wisconsin.

34 William Howard Taft was a great admirer of TNW’s father, an admiration partly traceable to their ties to Yale. As secretary of war (1904-1908) and then president (1909-1913), he was instrumental in getting TNW’s father appointed consul general, first in Hong Kong and then in Shanghai.

35 TNW is referring to the oratorios Elijah (Felix Mendelssohn) and Messiah (George Frideric Handel).

36 Joseph Vance: An Ill-Written Autobiography (1906), a novel by English ceramic artist and author William Frend De Morgan (1839-1917).

37 TNW was now attending the Thacher School in Ojai, California, with his brother.

38 TNW probably misdated this letter, as he refers in it to having spent Christmas in Claremont with the Maynard family. His sister Charlotte was living with the Maynards while attending public school in Claremont.

39 Karl Czerny (1791-1857), Austrian pianist and composer.

40 Shortall (1895—1984) became a composer and teacher and remained friends with TNW and, especially, Amos N. Wilder for the rest of their lives.

41 TNW’s father arranged special instruction during the holidays for TNW Amos, and Charlotte at the Frank P. Brackett Observatory on the Pomona College campus in Claremont, California.

42 You Never Can Tell (1899), a four-act comedy by George Bernard Shaw.

43 The Great Wave at Kanagwa, a famous print by Japanese painter and wood engraver Katsushika Hokusai (1760—1849); it hung in the Wilder home in Hamden, Connecticut.

44 Play (1912) by Bennett, in collaboration with Edward Knoblock.

45 Members of a circle of Wilder family friends in Shanghai; Mrs. Malpas put TNW and Charlotte on the boat from China to San Francisco in the summer of 1912.

46 The O’Connors, the Vincents, the Hannas, the Robertsons, and Mrs. Moore were close Wilder family friends in Berkeley.

47 Sherman D. Thacher.

48 Morgan’s novel Somehow Good was published in 1908.

49 How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (1910) offers practical advice on how one might live (as opposed to simply existing) within the confines of a twenty-four-hour day.

50 Bennett’s humorous memoir, The Truth About an Author (1903), emphasizes the commercial aspects of authorship.

51 Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), a modern morality play set in a boardinghouse.

52 The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), a play by William Butler Yeats.

53 The play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1907).

54 A biography (1857) by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865).

55 A novel (1853).

56 Marie Claire (1910; Eng. tr., 1911), novel by French author Marguerite Audoux (1863-1937), who was in fact a seamstress by trade.

57 The correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning was published by their son, Penini: The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols. (1899).

58 The correspondence of Edward FitzGerald: Letters and Literary Remains, edited by W.A. Wright (1899).

59 The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Edward FitzGerald’s translation (1859) of the Persian poem, which concentrates on the pleasures of the senses as the primary reason to live.

60 Nordhoff, a town near Ojai.

61 TNW’s twin, who died at birth, was frequently referred to as Pax by the Wilder family.

62 TNW is referring to James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.

63 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

64 Latin: unutterable or unspeakable.

65 TNW and Charlotte (“Sharlie”) were now enrolled as juniors at Berkeley High School.

66 Chinese orphan “adopted” by TNW’s father in Shanghai; he was sent in 1913 to live in Berkeley with the family and attend school there. He later became a minister, the Reverend John K. L. Yong.

67 Latin: a period of time.

68 This one-act play has not survived.

69 TNW’s brother was now attending Oberlin College.

70 Marshall Darrach, a noted English solo performer of Shakespeare, was in San Francisco for six weeks in the fall of 1913 and gave a Shakespeare recital on September 27.

71 TNW’s father was now in Berkeley with his family.

72 TNW was spending the summer working on the farm of Ellwood Varney, Jr., as arranged by TNW’s father.

73 There appears to be no question that TNW’s father wanted both his sons to graduate from Yale; it was his plan that, after two years at Oberlin, his son Amos would transfer to Yale for the last two years of his college education.

74 German: and so forth.

75 The present New Haven railroad station was not built until 1918.

76 After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, the world was preparing for war.

77 French: severe criticism of the family.

78 TNW was scheduled to enter Oberlin in the fall of 1915.

79 German painter Heinrich Hofmann (1824-1911), famous for his religious works depicting the life of Jesus.

80 Amos N. Wilder’s nickname.

81 English actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson (1853-1937) performed Hamlet, Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back, George Fleming’s The Light That Failed, and G. B. Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra at Oakland’s Cort Theatre in December 1914 and early January 1915.

82 Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge, painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

83 The Panama-Pacific International Exposition opened in February 1915 and ran until December 1915.

84 German: dispute.

85 George Pierce Baker conducted the famous 47 Workshop, begun in 1905 in the English Department at Harvard University. It was an undergraduate course on playwriting techniques and a laboratory for experimental productions.

86 Wilhelm Tell (1804), a play by Friedrich von Schiller.

87 “Stabat Mater Dolorosa,” a thirteenth-century Roman Catholic hymn attributed to Jacopone da Todi. The Berkeley Oratorio Society performed Italian composer Giocchino Antonio Rossini’s version in the Greek Theatre on April 2 and repeated it on April 4 and 25 at Festival Hall in San Francisco.

88 Grainger (1882-1961) settled permanently in the United States in 1914.

89 Italian violinist Serato (1877-1948); Russian-American violinist Zimbalist (1889-1985); Rumanian-born American classical soprano Gluck (1884—1938), Zimbalist’s wife; and Dutch mezzosoprano Culp (1880-1970).

90 TNW’s sister Charlotte would be attending Mount Holyoke College in the fall of 1915.

91 Art and antiques dealer Frederic C. Torrey was a Berkeley neighbor.

92 English actor, producer, director, dramatist, and scholar Harley Granville-Barker (1877—1946), whose innovative productions of new translations of such classical works as Iphigenia in Taurus and The Trojan Women by Euripides, starring his wife, English actress Lillah McCarthy (1875—1960), played in outdoor venues at American colleges and universities.

93 Amos P. Wilder arranged for his son’s train fare east so TNW could visit him in New Haven; he would then provide TNW with a plan for his summer activity.

94 Roman general, statesman, and writer Gaius Julius Caesar; Roman historian Cornelius Nepos, whose major work is a collection of biographies of Roman and non-Roman leaders.

95 Roman orator, statesman, political theorist, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero; Roman historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus, known as Sallust.

96 TNW ultimately spent two years at Oberlin, then repeated his sophomore year at Yale, from which he graduated in 1920. Jeptha (Judges 11) impetuously promises God that if he is victorious in battle, he will sacrifice the first person he meets on his return: That person is his daughter Iphis.

97 Rauschenbusch was a noted Baptist preacher and a leading spokesman for the Social Gospel movement.

98 Raymond C. Brooks served as minister of the First Congregational Church of Berkeley from 1913 to 1921.

99 TNW’s brother was a nationally ranked amateur tennis player.

100 TNW and his brother spent a portion of the summer working on the Dutton farm in the southeastern corner of Vermont.

101 Charles H. A. Wager, professor of English and head of the Oberlin English Department for thirty-five years, became one of TNW’s most important mentors.

102 TNW spent his Christmas vacation in 1915 at Oberlin.

103 Many of the items TNW mentions in this letter were completed; some were published, while others can be found in parts or fragments in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. An undated manuscript notebook contains act 1 of “The Graves Family,” as well as undated holograph manuscript fragments. There is a holograph manuscript of “The Last Word About Burglars” and a program for the production of this play with “A Fable for Those Who Plague,” for May 9, 1916. Nothing remains of any work titled “Ventures Joyous,” or “The New Belinda.” TNW’s Shakespeare essay was published as “The Language of Emotion in Shakespeare” in the Oberlin Literary Magazine for March 1916. The following month, his short story “Sealing Wax” was published in the Oberlin Literary Magazine, as was “Brother Fire: A Comedy for Saints,” in the May 1916 Oberlin Literary Magazine. Another of his “Three Minute Playlets for Three Persons,” No. 6, may have been “Solus Inter Deos Protens: No. 6,” which was never published but exists in an undated manuscript notebook at Yale. There is no record of the projected “Archangel’s Fires,” although there is the possibility it could have been reworked and retitled.

104 French actress and singer (1881-1920), notorious in France, England, and the United States for her daring on and off the stage; reference may be to a poem TNW wrote about her that has not survived.

105 Comedy (1751) by Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni (1707—1793) about how a woman treats four suitors, each of whom personifies a different attitude toward her sex. Again, the reference may be to a poem by TNW that has not survived.

106 Harry Ernest Peabody (1865—1940) was a Congregational clergyman who was related through marriage to TNW’s father.

107 Marion E. Knight (1891-1941) was at this time a graduate student at Oberlin after attending Mount Holyoke College.

108 Mary Emma Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke College from 1901 to 1937.

109 Mrs. Charles Gammon (Mary Stanley Gammon), Theodore Wilder’s maternal aunt, whom he called “Aunt Mame.”

110 Edwin DeWitt Hotchkiss was at this time a student in Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music.

111 Jeanne Françoise Récamier (1777—1849), French socialite well-known for her beauty, whose salon was a gathering place for the leading political and literary figures of her day; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), English writer known primarily for her letters, which were first published in 1763 and which revealed her to be a highly intelligent woman in a male-dominated society.

112 The play variously called “Ventures Joyous” and “The New Belinda” (see letter number 27) became “The Rocket: An American Comedy in Four Acts,” which can be found as an undated corrected typescript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. It is not known whether or not TNW sent “The Rocket” to American actress, producer, and director Grace George (see letter number 36).

113 French: Eh?

114 In 1916, May 6 was a Saturday; TNW probably misdated this letter.

115 Giorgione’s painting Pastoral Concert.

116 Painter George Bellows.

117 TNW is probably referring to “The Rocket: An American Comedy in Four Acts.”

118 Apparently a formal contract for the farm labor TNW was scheduled to do during the summer of 1916 at the Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts.

119 Dwight Lyman Moody (1837—1899) was an evangelist who founded the Mount Hermon School for Boys (1881) and its sister institution, the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies (1879), both designed to serve students with limited means.

120 Lac Léman, the French name for Lake Geneva.

121 TWN is referring to the Chautauqua Institution. Founded in western New York State in 1874 to provide religious and secular instruction to Methodist Episcopal Sunday school teachers during the summer, Chautauqua later offered summer courses in the arts, sciences, and humanities, as well as lectures and performances by musicians, artists, and well-known political figures.

122 TNW originally wrote “Dear Family” but crossed out “Family” and substituted “Mother only.”

123 Miss Hanna and Miss Day were Berkeley friends of the Wilder family.

124 After graduating from Oberlin in June 1916, Ruth Keller (1894—1973) taught school for two years in her hometown, worked for the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., married, and had six children (one son’s middle name was Thornton).

125 TNW is referring to Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; disguised as a lawyer, Portia cleverly and fairly wins the case in which Shylock has demanded a pound of flesh owed to him by her husband’s friend Antonio.

126 The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was often referred to as “the weeping philosopher.”

127 Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder, plays by Henrik Ibsen; Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson L.L.D.; and Religio Medici, a prose work by English author and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682).

128 American journalist and novelist Ernest Poole (1880—1950), whose essay appeared in The Century Magazine.

129 Max Wilder (1894-1962), TNW’s cousin, the son of TNW’s father’s older brother Julian Wilder (1860-1938).

130 TNW met Kommer, a Viennese drama critic (1885—1943) and assistant to Austrian theatrical producer and director Max Reinhardt, during his summer vacation in 1916 at Monhegan Island, Maine, after he finished his work at the Mount Hermon School. The island had long been the site of an artists’ colony.

131 TNW added this exclamation point after “Maine” on the letterhead of the stationery.

132 Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal tells the story of a Knight Templar and his search for the Holy Grail. The Wilder family possesses a completed undated typescript of a three-minute playlet, “The Lost Miracle of the Graal,” which may have been written at this time.

133 American actress Mary Shaw (1854-1929) portrayed Mrs. Alving in Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts in numerous productions, most notably in New York in 1916-1917. The Melody of Youth, a play by Irish-born American dramatist, actor, and director Brandon Tynan (1875-1967), also played in New York in 1916, although Mary Shaw was not in the cast.

134 Hit-the-Trail Holiday, a play by George M. Cohan.

135 German poet, dramatist, and prose writer Herbert Eulenberg (1876—1949) does not seem to have a published work called Schattenphantasie, but his Schattenbilder: Eine Fibel für Kulturbedürtige in Deutschland was published in 1910. TNW mentions this book in his foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1928).

136 In a July 12, 1916, letter to his mother, TNW mentions that he has written a three-minute playlet for three persons, “Mr. Bozzy,” which is about Johnson, Mrs. Thrale, and Boswell. It survives as an undated typescript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

137 Possibly, TNW is referring to Russian-born American humorist and journalist Simeon Strunsky (1879-1948).

138 TNW may be referring to his story “Two Miracles of Doma Y Venuzias,” which appeared in the November 1916 issue of the Oberlin Literary Magazine. Charlotte Wilder’s article “Of the Class of ’52” was a humorous comparison of her era and the Mount Holyoke class of 1852; it appeared in the October 1916 issue of The Mount Holyoke.

139 Latin: Unbelievable judge, how long will you abuse our patience. This line is TNW’s play on Cicero’s line “Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?” from the Orations Against Catiline.

140 On September 26, 1916, eight days after his twenty-first birthday, TNW’s brother enlisted as a volunteer ambulance driver. He sailed for France on October 21 to begin a three-month assignment with the American Field Service (AFS) in Paris.

141 The Baglioni family dominated political life in the Italian city of Perugia from the fifteenth century through the early sixteenth century. In 1520, Gian Paolo Baglioni was lured to Rome and beheaded by Leo X.

142 American stage and film actress Ferguson (1883-1961) appeared in the stage production of The Outcast (1914), by English dramatist Hubert Henry Davies, and repeated her role in the film version (1922).

143 Leonard Clough Peabody, a member of the Oberlin class of 1920 and son of “Uncle Harry” Peabody (see letter number 27).

144 Probably “Prosperina and the Devil: A Play for Marionettes,” which appeared in the December 1916 issue of the Oberlin Literary Magazine.

145 English actress and mistress of King Charles II, Eleanor Gwyn (known as “Nell”) died on November 14, 1687; Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850.

146 The comedy Menaechmi, by Roman dramatist Titus Maccius Plautus; it was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.

147 TNW’s story is “Two Miracles of Doma Y Venuzias”; Watson’s story is “A Pessimist’s Perspective of Life” Both appeared in the November 1916 issue of the Oberlin Literary Magazine. TNW befriended Watson and introduced him to a wider musical repertoire for voice. Ade (1866-1944) was an American humorist and dramatist.

148 Agnes Gammon, Theodore Wilder’s first cousin and Mrs. Gammon’s daughter.

149 English novelist Ethel Sidgwick (1877—1970), author of A Lady of Leisure (1914), Duke Jones (1914), and The Accolade (1915).

150 An undated manuscript of “The Masque of the Bright Haired” is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

151 American dramatist and poet Percy MacKaye (1875-1956) assisted on the production of Sophocles’ Antigone that ran at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley during the summer of 1910; TNW also attended a performance of MacKaye’s Anti-Matrimony (1910) that same summer.

152 “Stones at Nell Gwynn” has not survived. Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Roman lyric poet. Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) was an English poet. François Villon is considered the greatest French poet of the late Middle Ages. The Washington Square Players was founded in 1914 as an alternative to the commercial Broadway theater; when the group disbanded in 1918, its leading members went on to form the Theatre Guild in 1919.

153 In his Pensées (1670), Blaise Pascal contended that reason was insufficient to solve man’s dilemmas and satisfy his longings.

154 Isabel attended New Haven High School in 1916—1917, after having applied too late to be admitted to Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts.

155 Hush!, by Violet Pearn, ran in October and November 1916; Pierrot the Prodigal, with music by André Wormser and book by Michel Carré, ran between September 1916 and January 1917; The Yellow Jacket, by George C. Hazelton and J. Harry Benrimo, ran in 1916—1917; A Kiss for Cinderella, by J. M. Barrie, ran between December 1916 and May 1917; Shirley Kaye, by Hurlbert Footner, ran between December 1916 and March 1917; Getting Married, by George Bernard Shaw, ran between November 1916 and February 1917. Russian actress Alla Nazimova (1879—1945) appeared in ’Ception Shoals, by H. Austin Adams; the play ran in early 1917.

156 Turn to the Right, by John E. Hazzard and Winchell Smith, ran between August 1916 and September 1917; Cheating Cheaters, by Max Marcin, ran between August 1916 and April 1917; Nothing But the Truth, by James Montgomery, ran between September 1916 and July 1917.

157 This play has not survived.

158 TNW is probably referring to his father here.

159 Novel (1898) by Irish writer George Moore.

160 In his play Anatol (1893), Austrian dramatist Arthur Schnitzler depicted the amorous escapades of a Casanova-like adventurer who goes from one woman to another.

161 Hungarian-born American actor and dramatist Leo James Dietrichstein (1864-1928).

162 The lines are from “The Great Lover” (1914) by Rupert Brooke, who was killed during World War I.

163 Oberlin, like many American colleges and universities, had begun military instruction on their campus when it became increasingly clear that the United States would enter the war in Europe.

164 Latin: God willing certainly.

165 On April 2, 1917, the U.S. government had signed contracts to begin construction of over three hundred torpedo boats to be used in detecting and chasing enemy submarines. Their tonnage restricted the size of the crew and necessitated the use of as much automatic equipment as possible.

166 Trego (1893-1932) graduated from Oberlin in 1917 and was a close friend and literary confidante of TNW.

167 Latin: It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.

168 English churchman and author John Henry Newman (1801-1890) resigned his position in the Church of England, converted to Catholicism, and was made a cardinal in 1879.

169 William Lyon Phelps and Chauncey Brewster Tinker were leading faculty members at Yale University at this time, while Charles Townsend Copeland and George Pierce Baker held similar positions at Harvard University.

170 Highly respected rabbi with whom the apostle Paul studied.

171 TNW’s father had arranged for his son to spend part of the summer of 1917 working and taking a class in typing at Berea College in Kentucky.

172 Latin: I consider nothing human foreign to me.

173 The New Word (1915) ran in New York between May and June 1917; it appeared on a bill with two other Barrie one-acts, Old Friends (1910) and The Old Lady Shows Her Medals (1917), the latter of which also dealt with the war.

174 Among the honors John Donne received toward the end of his life was being named dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621.

175 Ik Marvel was the pen name of American essayist and novelist Donald Grant Mitchell (1822-1908); he was best known for his books of sentimental essays, Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) and Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons (1851).

176 Hi-O-Hi was the student yearbook at Oberlin.

177 Play (1914) by Irish dramatist and poet Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), the eighteenth baron of Dunsany.

178 After serving for three months as an ambulance driver in the Argonne region, TNW’s brother began a seven-day leave on May 16, 1917, visiting London and England’s Lake District.

179 American editor, publisher, and writer Elbert Hubbard (1856—1915) was known as “Fra Albertus.” He is best known for founding the Roycroft Community in East Aurora, New York. Roycroft, established in 1895, was an important part of the American Arts and Crafts movement. Katherine Hubbard, born in 1895, was one of the children born to Hubbard and his first wife, Bertha.

180 Frost, who had been a professor of Greek at Oberlin College from 1876 to 1892, was now president of Berea College.

181 TNW may be referring to In Ole Virginia (1887), a book of short stories by Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922).

182 Etta Parsons Embree (1882-1962), the wife of a Berea trustee.

183 Sankey (1840-1908), a gospel singer and composer, was one of the compilers of and contributors to Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs (1875). He composed the music for many hymns. Sankey was closely associated with fellow evangelist Dwight Moody, the founder of Mount Hermon School.

184 Had TNW not repeated his sophomore year when he transferred to Yale and had his brother returned earlier from Europe, the three eldest Wilder children might have graduated from college in 1919.

185 TNW’s contribution to the June 1917 issue of the Oberlin Literary Magazine was a short fictional fable, “The Marriage of Zabett,” which dealt with a young woman’s struggle to choose between marriage and the call of the church. Nina Trego’s poem was titled “Confession.”

186 It is unclear to which work TNW is referring here; no work matching this description appears to have survived.

187 Sinister Street (1913), a controversial novel by English author Compton MacKenzie.

188 TNW did repeat his sophomore year. Frederick Scheetz Jones was the dean at this time.

189 Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977), whom TNW first met at Oberlin, eventually transferred to Yale, graduated with the class of 1921, attended Yale Law School, of which he became dean in 1927, and then went to the University of Chicago, where he served as president and then chancellor.

190 TNW is referring to Fioretti del Glorioso Poverello di Christo S. Francesco di Assisi, a collection of stories about the life and teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi.

191 TNW is probably referring to George Stransom in James’s story “The Altar of the Dead.” Stransom lights candles as a rite for his dead friends; he begins this ritual on his birthday. Bricharis and Samma may refer to pets belonging to the Wagers.

192 TNW’s brother was now an AFS ambulance driver in Macedonia.

193 George Durand Wilder, Jr. (1908—1984), Theodore Wilder’s younger brother.

194 Latin: he himself said it (meaning an unproven assertion).

195 When TNW arrived at Oberlin, he already knew both Theodore Wilder and his younger brother Durand from Chefoo. While at Oberlin, he became acquainted with their sisters, Margaret (1898-1987) and Ursula (1902-1997), as well as with their maternal grandmother (Mrs. Charles A. Stanley), their cousin Agnes, and their Aunt Mame, who kept house for them all.

196 Bushnell was a nineteenth-century Congregational minister, and Sill was a nineteenth-century poet.

197 TNW’s brother had enlisted in the U.S. Army in Paris in November 1917 and was assigned to field artillery in the Second Division.

198 The military training camp in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

199 Edwin DeWitt Hotchkiss (see letter number 28), who, in May 1918, entered the army.

200 Simonds (1896—1989) was a concert pianist and a Yale classmate and close friend of TNW; he taught at the Yale School of Music, where he also served as the dean.

201 With his father’s help, TNW got a thirty-five-dollar-a-month job as a clerk typist at the War Industries Board during the summer of 1918.

202 When he first went to Washington, TNW shared an apartment with Yale friends John F. Carter, Jr., and Stephen Vincent Benét. Benét, who was in Washington as a clerk in the State Department and was a class ahead of TNW at Yale, was already recognized as a major literary talent. He served on the Yale Literary Review’s editorial board and published three volumes of poetry while still an undergraduate.

203 A typescript of the unfinished comedy “Vecy-Segal” is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. A fragment, “Sea Chanty: ‘Vecy-Segal,’ Scene IV” was published in S<sb>4</sb>N in December 1919.

204 William Rose Benét, Stephen Vincent Benét’s older brother, was a leading American poet and anthologist.

205 Hearts of the World (1918), a silent film directed by D. W Griffith.

206 The career of American film actress Marsh (1895-1968) spanned fifty years.

207 Latin: critical vantage point.

208 The volume TNW submitted probably contained some of the five short plays he had published in the Oberlin Literary Magazine in 1915 and 1916 and the six playlets he had published in the Yale Literary Magazine in 1917 and 1918.

209 Producer, director, theater owner, and writer Arthur Hopkins (1878—1950) produced A Very Good Young Man, by Martin Brown, in Washington in August. In the spring of 1919 and then again in September 1919-February 1920, he produced The Jest, starring John Barrymore. Although Nazimova appeared in three Ibsen plays produced by Hopkins, she did not appear in a production by him of Ibsen’s The Master Builder.

210 L’Aiglon (1900), a play by dramatist and poet Edmond Rostand about the tragic life of Napoleon’s son.

211 Symphony on a French Mountain Air (1886), by French composer Vincent D’Indy (1851-1931).

212 TNW’s review of A Very Good Young Man appeared in the Boston Transcript on August 17, 1918.

213 TNW submitted the play “The Breaking of Exile” to Hopkins, but it was never produced; a copy survives as a holograph and undated incomplete typescript and undated typescript carbon manuscript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The note from Hopkins’s secretary has not survived.

214 TNW is referring to the small flags (a blue star in the center of a red-bordered white rectangle) that families during World War I hung in their windows. Each star represented a son serving in the military.

215 Grand Manan Island at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada.

216 On September 14, 1918, TNW was inducted as an office orderly into the army’s First Coast Artillery Corps stationed at Fort Adams, Newport, Rhode Island. He was discharged as a corporal on December 31, 1918, and returned to Yale.

Chapter 2

1 French, Lemon & Co. was a place where foreigners picked up their mail.

2 Daily newspapers.

3 Italian poet Vittoria Colonna (1492—1547) lived on the island of Ischia for many years. French poet Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine (1790—1869) visited Ischia and wrote a poem by that name.

4 French: ulterior motive.

5 72 Conn. was TNW’s room in Connecticut Hall at Yale; Whitney Avenue was the road that ran past the Wilder family home in Mount Carmel, approximately eight miles from the Yale campus.

6 Italian: bill.

7 Italian: dialect.

8 Italian: a tip.

9 On September 16, 1920, an explosion rocked the heart of New York’s Financial District, killing over thirty people; those responsible for the bombing were never apprehended.

10 German educator Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (1782-1852) was the founder of the kindergarten system.

11 Latin: immediately.

12 Henry R. Luce, later the founder of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, was TNW’s classmate at both Chefoo and Yale; William Dwight Whitney was TNW’s classmate at Yale. Luce and Whitney were Rhodes scholars at this time.

13 Probably TNW’s wordplay for the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

14 TNW no doubt meant the Whore of Babylon, a derogatory term for the Roman Catholic Church.

15 The Blakes were aunt Charlotte Tappan Niven’s closest friends; he was an Anglican priest.

16 TNW is referring to King Lear’s daughter, who is disinherited by her father because of her refusal to flatter and fawn over him but who eventually proves to be the only daughter who truly cares about him.

17 TNW’s father was a nationally known orator and often spoke at private schools and before such groups as the National Municipal League.

18 Hero of Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis, who has a sheltered and spoiled childhood.

19 Adolfo de Bosis was an Italian poet and translator. His son Lauro de Bosis (1901—1931) translated TNW’s 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, into Italian. Lauro de Bosis was one of the two people to whom TNW dedicated his 1948 novel, The Ides of March.

20 Shelley’s epic poem Epipsychidion was dedicated to Emilia Viviani. Richard Garnett was an editor of Shelley’s poetry.

21 Pantagruel is the principal character in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel.

22 TNW is referring to “Villa Rhabini,” which survives in holograph and in a typescript carbon in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

23 The Telegram was the only English-language evening newspaper in Paris. TNW submitted several articles on the theater to them, but none were published.

24 Mrs. Kendall and Polly Comstock were New Haven acquaintances; William Douglas was a friend of TNW’s from Yale who published poetry in the Yale Literary Magazine..

25 Rosemary Carr.

26 Barney (1892-1952), Yale class of 1916, was a poet and photographer.

27 A residence hall at Yale, also known as West Divinity Hall, it was torn down in 1931 to make way for Calhoun College.

28 Located on the edge of the Yale campus, it was a private club that contained rooms for boarders.

29 Tennis trophies TNW’s brother won in amateur tournaments.

30 French: month

31 During this period, Isabel Wilder was writing one-act plays, two of which TNW copyrighted for her in 1922; apparently, she saw in a magazine an advertisement for a course in writing for the movies, which interested her.

32 TNW’s aunt was probably in Paris in connection with her work for the YWCA.

33 Charlotte Wilder had moved to Boston, where she worked as a companion/secretary to a family, then as a governess, and then as a proofreader at The Atlantic Monthly.

34 During the summer of 1922, in a rented room at the YMCA in Newport, Rhode Island, TNW, stimulated by his reading of French authors Proust and Morand, continued writing what later evolved into The Cabala.

35 The short sections appeared in the September 1922 issue of The Double Dealer, a little magazine that in that same year published early work by William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

36 The Dial did not publish any of TNW’s fictional memoir.

37 Augusta Homer Saint-Gaudens was the widow of the noted American sculptor; their son, Homer Saint-Gaudens, was an author, art critic, and museum director. At one time, he worked as a stage director for American actress Maude Adams.

38 Gilbert McCoy Troxell (1893-1967), a friend of TNW’s while they were both Yale undergraduates, was at the time working at the Yale library, where he later became the curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature. They remained good friends until Troxell’s death.

39 Novel (1861) by George Meredith.

40 Cornelius Vanderbilt began his career by ferrying passengers from Staten Island to Manhattan.

41 Belasco (1853-1931), American director, dramatist, and manager.

42 Wilmarth Sheldon “Lefty” Lewis (1895—1979) was TNW’s schoolmate at both Thacher and Yale; his 1922 novel was Tutors’ Lane.

43 French: You tell me what you think!

44 Latin: sweet glory.

45 This playlet was published in the January—February 1923 issue of the little magazine S<sb>4</sb>N, where TNW’s writing appeared with some regularity.

46 Charlotte was a junior editor of The Youth’s Companion.

47 Like Tinker and Phelps, John M. Berdan was also a celebrated member of the Department of English at Yale.

48 The article was published as “The Shelley Centenary—A Notable Exhibition of Shelleyana at the Brick Row Book Shop” in the October 13, 1922, issue of the Yale Alumni Weekly.

49 TNW is probably referring to “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead.”

50 TNW had recommended this play to his father during its 1917 New York run (see letter number 52).

51 TNW’s review of English dramatist, poet, and novelist Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer ran on the front page of the student newspaper The Lawrence on February 8, 1923.

52 Momauguin was a beach community and resort in East Haven, on Long Island Sound; TNW’s family probably spent some of the summer there.

53 Italian: dear.

54 Charlotte Wilder’s brief essay “Hail and Farewell,” an impressionistic piece about places visited and remembered, appeared in the January 1923 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

55 Fitch was professor of the history of religion at Amherst College and author of Preaching and Paganism (1920).

56 At this time, Young was the chief drama critic of The New Republic and an associate editor of Theatre Arts Magazine. TNW met him on shipboard when returning from Europe in August 1921.

57 Daughter of Mather A. Abbott, headmaster of Lawrenceville.

58 Saint-Simon’s Memoirs offers a vivid account of life in the court of Louis XIV

59 Siegfried et le Limousin (1922), a novel by French dramatist and novelist Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), which the author later adapted into a play, Siegfried (1928).

60 Doormats, Outcast, and The Mollusc were plays by Hubert Henry Davies; all three were published in vol. 2 of The Plays of Hubert Henry Davies (1921), which may be the Christmas present to which TNW refers.

61 Between May 1, 1923, and December 31, 1923, TNW hand-copied many of the letters he sent into a “Letter Book.” This unsigned transcription is from that copy; the original letter has not been located.

62 TNW sent his play “The Trumpet Shall Sound” to Edith Isaacs, the editor of Theatre Arts Magazine. The play had been published in four successive issues of the Yale Literary Magazine (October, November, December 1919; January 1920) and won Yale’s Bradford Brinton Award. While Isaacs did not accept the play for publication, she was instrumental in arranging its first production in 1926 (for which TNW made some revisions to his text).

63 German: even as a boy he knew more of German literature than most Germans.

64 Presumably, TNW is referring to the tragic Queen Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

65 Russian director and actor Konstantin Stanislavski (1865-1938), cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre.

66 Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), American industrial and theatrical designer who pioneered the use of lenses in stage lighting. In 1957, TNW collaborated with Bel Geddes on the script for a film about the American experience, “The Melting Pot.” Bel Geddes’s death ended the venture, though TNW copyrighted the script, which survives as an undated holograph manuscript and as an undated corrected typescript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

67 Elizabeth Lewis Niven died in early June 1923.

68 John Kelman, the minister of New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.

69 TNW spent part of the summer working at this summer camp for boys.

70 Dutch novelist Louis Marie Anne Couperus (1863-1923).

71 English novelist Hichens (1864-1950).

72 French novelist and critic Bourget (1852-1935).

73 TNW misquotes French writer Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696). The actual quote is from Les Caractères (1688): “Il y a de certaines choses dont la médiocrité est insupportable: la poésie, la musique, la peinture, le discours public.” (“There are certain things where mediocrity is insupportable: poetry, music, painting, and public discourse”) Le roman is French for the “novel.”

74 Arthur Twining Hadley was president of Yale University from 1899 to 1921.

75 Marian Whitney.

76 Lawrence’s “Trees and Babies and Papas and Mamas” appeared in the June 1923 issue of the English magazine The Adelphi.

77 Ferenc Molnár (1878-1952).

78 American actress whose Broadway career extended from 1913 to 1924.

79 Château des Rochers, Madame de Sévigné’s country home near Vitré, Brittany.

80 A fashionable and prestigious address in New Haven.

81 French: local group.

82 Latin: master of arts.

83 At the invitation of Edith Isaacs, TNW wrote a review of sixteen new Broadway plays; tided “The Turn of the Year,” it appeared in the March 1924 issue of Theatre Arts Magazine.

84 A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), by English spiritual writer and mystic William Law (1686-1761).

85 English engineer and inventor Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898).

86 First novel (1923) by American novelist and poet Elinor Wylie (1885—1928), wife of William Rose Benét.

87 Ames (1906-1988), whom TNW met at Lawrenceville, probably in the fall of 1924, when she was a guest of the headmaster, became a stage and film actress.

88 TNW probably meant Homer Saint-Gaudens (see letter number 74).

89 Richard Boleslavsky (1889-1937), Russian-trained actor and director, began his career as an actor with the Moscow Art Theatre before coming to the United States and founding the American Laboratory Theatre, with Russian actress Maria Ouspenskaya in 1923.

90 Franklin H. Sargent was an acting coach at New York’s Madison Square Theatre in the late nineteenth century.

91 “Geraldine de Gray” was apparently never completed; incomplete holograph and typescript versions survive in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

92 TNW is referring to Spanish dramatist José Echegray’s best-known work, his play El Gran Galeoto (1881).

93 Amy Wertheimer (1890-1971) became a binder of rare books for the University of Connecticut; she remained TNW’s friend and correspondent to the end of her life.

94 TNW’s phrase “the merry wives of Blodgett” refers to Blodgett’s Landing, one of the eleven original steamboat landings on Lake Sunapee, and the site of the summer camp.

95 Wilbur L. Cross (1862-1948) was dean of the Graduate School at Yale at this time.

96 Ellie Jones Campbell was the daughter of Dean Frederick Scheetz Jones of Yale.

97 Italian: gentleman-in-waiting.

98 TNW’s brother had been writing poetry from boyhood. The first line TNW quotes is from his brother’s poem “Ode in a German Cemetery Where Many Victims of the Great War Were Interred,” and the second line is from “Lines by Arno.” Both poems were published in Amos N. Wilder’s Battle Retrospect (1923), a volume that was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

99 The Wilder family now lived in a house at 75 Mansfield Street in New Haven.

100 The errors in the first edition of The Cabala, alluded to by TNW, were corrected in the second edition: “heure de champagne” to “heure du champagne”; “exampla gratia” to “exempli gratia”; and “the conversation of France” to “the conversion of France.” In all, the first edition of The Cabala contained twenty-eight errors.

101 A Monogram for Jesus Christ.

102 TNW is referring to the MacDowell Colony, located in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

103 Alix d’Espoli is a character in The Cabala.

104 TNW tutored Andrew Townson in English and French from mid-April to mid-June, while he was completing his M.A. He began work on what would become his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), during his stay in the summer of 1926 at the MacDowell Colony.

105 Alan Wilfred Cranbrook Menzies was a professor of chemistry at Princeton at this time. Sarah Morton Frantz was a resident of Princeton.

106 There was a review of The Cabala in the Chicago Evening Post Literary Review on May 14, 1926, signed by Louise George.

107 Abarbanell was an opera singer. Goldbeck’s review of The Cabala, “Real People Masquerade Behind Mask of Fiction in Story Laid in Rome,” appeared in the New York Evening Post Literary Review on May 15, 1926.

108 Jean was one of Amy Wertheimer’s two daughters.

109 A Yale classmate of TNW, Baer worked for Albert & Charles Boni and was responsible for soliciting The Cabala for the firm.

110 TNW is referring to his “three-minute playlets for three persons,” most written at Oberlin and Yale and published in those schools’ literary magazines. Sixteen of these “playlets” were published by another New York publisher, Coward-McCann, in 1928 in The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays.

111 The Century Magazine published a favorable brief review of The Cabala in its August 1926 issue.

112 The first book mentioned is a novel (1921) by American writer Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne: the second is a novel (1925) by Elinor Wylie.

113 TNW met American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1924 and tried to get him to switch publishers, although TNW was unsuccessful in this endeavor.

114 TNW was accompanying Andrew Townson on a European tour and acting as his chaperone during the fall of 1926.

115 This date is written in handwriting that may not be TNW’s.

116 There is no evidence that American writer Jim Tully (1886-1947) collaborated on a play with Graves, but Tully did collaborate with Robert Nichols on Twenty Below (1927).

117 Douglas C. Townson, Andrew’s father.

118 Morgan, Harjes was a Paris bank where one could receive mail.

119 Richard Boleslavsky agreed to produce TNW’s play The Trumpet Shall Sound in repertory at his American Laboratory Theatre in December 1926. Horace Dabney a character in the play is a former ship captain; he is a marked man because he deserted his sinking ship, leaving scores to drown.

120 English publisher Longmans, Green & Co. had published The Cabala in October; TNW’s aunt Charlotte was living in London, working for the International YWCA.

121 John Hadley Nicanor “Bumby” Hemingway was born on October 10, 1923.

122 Bruce T. Simonds.

123 Both French dramatist Jean Racine and Blaise Pascal are entombed in Paris’s Église Saint-Etienne-du-Mont.

124 French poet, bookseller, and publisher (1892-1955) who founded the bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres in Paris in 1915, across the street from where Sylvia Beach later opened her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company She and Beach became lifelong companions.

125 Paris café that was a popular gathering place for writers.

126 English novelist (1893-1940), whose Medal Without Bar (1930) was considered one of the best novels about World War I.

127 Through intricate political and social maneuverings, Mrs. Roy, a character in The Cabala, attempts to obtain a divorce at the Vatican under the Pauline Privilege, an arcane procedure. Consuelo Vanderbilt obtained an annulment decree from the Catholic Church despite having been married to the duke of Marlborough for twenty-five years and bearing him two sons.

128 On April 7, 1926, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was wounded in the face when he was shot by Violet Gibson; three other assassination attempts occurred between April and October 1926.

129 The American Laboratory Theatre production of The Trumpet Shall Sound opened to negative reviews on December 10, 1926, but remained in their repertory for several months.

130 TNW’s application for a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to study drama in Germany was unsuccessful, unlike that of Stephen Vincent Benét, who received one in 1926.

131 TNW met Nichols (1902-1987) in 1921 or 1922 in New York, when he spotted him reading Keats in a restaurant, then met him again at Balliol College, Oxford, in October 1926, when TNW was touring England with Andrew Townson; he was also one of the Oxonians with whom TNW spent Christmas in December 1926. He and TNW remained friends and corresponded intermittently to the end of TNW’s life.

132 Edward C. Aswell was assistant editor of The Forum magazine.

133 The review appeared in the column “Our Booking-Office” in the January 19, 1927, issue.

134 The role of Flora in The Trumpet Shall Sound was played in repertory by two actresses, Helen Coburn and Florence House.

135 Ray Bridgman may be the husband or son of the Mrs. Bridgman whom TNW met during his Christmas on the Rviera in 1926.

136 The Theatre Guild production of The Brothers Karamazov ran on Broadway in January and February 1927. Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre presented the first English-language production in the United States of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in repertory between October 1926 and April 1927.

137 According to a June 16, 1927, letter TNW sent to Roy Curtis at the University of Michigan, The Trumpet Shall Sound was presented for the first time outside New York by the Comedy Club at that university on March 30, 1927, revised and with a new fourth act not present in the New York production.

138 This play (1926) by English dramatist and director Dane (1888-1965) played in repertory between February and April 1927 at the American Laboratory Theatre.

139 The Elizabethan Club is a private but Yale-affiliated organization for faculty and students interested in literature. Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), a comedy by American dramatist Anne Nichols, ran on Broadway from May 1922 to October 1927.

140 Josiah Royce (1855-1916), American philosopher. Both James and Royce taught at Harvard.

141 Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) was an American patroness of the arts and was well known for her salons in Italy and New York. She settled in Taos, New Mexico, where she was the center of the art colony there, hosting such visitors as D. H. Lawrence, Carl Jung, Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Graham, and, on several occasions, TNW.

142 Jerry Hart was another of the Oxonians on the Riviera during Christmas 1926.

143 TNW is referring to “Rhodes Scholars,” by O. B. Andrews, Jr., in the February 1927 issue of The American Mercury.

144 Muriel McCormick, the granddaughter of both Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, was a prominent socialite. After Muriel’s parents divorced, her father, Harold, married Ganna Waska, an aspiring opera singer.

145 In the original letter, the date appears at the end of the letter.

146 Weeks was the associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly. This letter appears in a typescript of an essay on TNW that Weeks wrote; the original letter has not been located.

147 J. C. Squire was editor of the monthly London Mercury an important outlet for new writers, from 1919 to 1934.

148 Hemingway’s short story “Fifty Grand” appeared in the July 1927 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

149 TNW met Glenn (1900-1976) when both were teaching at Lawrenceville School. Glenn left teaching to attend Virginia Theological Seminary and then became an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church. Glenn and TNW remained lifelong close friends.

150 Edwin Clyde Foresman, housemaster of Davis House at Lawrenceville, died on July 14, 1927.

151 German theologian and philosopher Otto (1869-1937) was the author of Das Heilige, or The Idea of the Holy (1917), one of the most important German theological books of the twentieth century.

152 TNW is referring to the biblical Martha and Mary, thereby suggesting to Glenn that he should refresh himself and leave his work.

153 Glenn was serving as an assistant in a church in Worcester, Massachusetts. Gibbs Sherrill was a Groton student TNW tutored for six weeks in Briarcliff, New York, in March and April 1927. Sir Wilfred Grenfell (1865-1940), an English physician and missionary, was famous for his work among the fishermen of Labrador.

154 Widow of Edwin Clyde Foresman.

155 TNW probably means Brearley a private school for girls in New York City where he apparently was offered a teaching position.

156 The only child of Edwin Clyde and Grace Christy Foresman, Emily Foresman was two years old when TNW went to Davis House in September 1921.

157 The Boni firm told TNW that they felt that The Bridge of San Luis Rey was too short to justify a price of $2.50 and suggested that they add several illustrations to the text. There was also a dispute over the handling of foreign rights.

158 TNW was asked by his English publisher, Longmans, Green, to translate the notorious avant-garde French novel Paulina 1880 (1925) by Pierre-Jean Jouve (1887-1976). It is not known whether he completed the translation, and the manuscript has not survived.

159 TNW spent a weekend on Cape Cod with Douglas and Marie Townson, Andy Townson’s parents, and planned to stop in Peterborough, New Hampshire, for supper with Marian MacDowell, widow of the American composer Edward Alexander MacDowell, before going on to visit Glenn. The MacDowells established the MacDowell Colony in 1907, and TNW had been there in July 1926, working on The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

160 Amy Wertheimer, five years older than TNW wanted their relationship to be a more romantic one; TNW worked hard to maintain a platonic but close friendship.

161 TNW may be using a name that he and Isabel used to refer to their sister Charlotte.

162 Tinker apparently wrote TNW a letter praising The Bridge of San Luis Rey: which had been published the previous month.

163 TNW had his appendix removed in New Haven in the fall of 1927 by Dr. William Francis Verdi, his father’s physician.

164 In the original letter, the date appears at the end of the letter, as well as here.

165 Fitzgerald, whose third novel, The Great Gatsby, had been published in 1925, apparently had written TNW a letter praising The Cabala.

166 In 1925, when Fitzgerald began planning the novel that would become Tender is the Night, his protagonist was Francis Melarky, a twenty-one-year-old southerner. In this early version, Fitzgerald intended for Melarky to join the fashionable young crowd on the Rviera and, after an alcoholic breakdown, murder his overly protective mother. The Melarky version was later abandoned.

167 Editor and publisher Cass Canfield (1897-1986) joined the publishing firm of Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row) in 1924. He served in a variety of positions there and became the president of the firm in 1931. He remained an editor at Harper until his death.

168 This is a secretarial transcription of TNW’s letter; the original letter has not been located.

169 In the copy of the letter, the date appears at the end of the letter.

170 The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays was published by Coward-McCann on October 29, 1928.

171 Unhappy with the Boni firm’s treatment, TNW signed a secret agreement committing to Harper upon the completion of his contractual obligations to Boni. In return, Harper agreed to give him a five-thousand-dollar annual subvention for three years, even while he worked on books still owed to Boni. Because of the financial success of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, TNW never called on these moneys. His contract with Boni covered his three books after The Cabala; the firm published The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), The Woman of Andros (1930), waived its right to The Angel That Troubled the Waters, and ultimately sold the third, Heaven’s My Destination (1935), to Harper.

172 This date is written on the letter in another hand, probably TNW’s mother’s.
These boys are going to drop in and out during the Summer and Gene Tunney in the Fall etc. If you don’t go over and choose it for me I shall have to ask Richard Blaker or Robert Longman to find it and they will overdo. And it must be started before June 20.

173 Head of Longmans, Green, TNW’s English publisher.

174 TNW signed a multi-year public lecturing contract with the well-known Lee Keedick Lecture Bureau to go on a lecture tour. Keedick also represented English writers Asquith, Chesterton, and Walpole. TNW lectured under the terms of this agreement until the spring of 1937.

175 The three boys, Henry Noy, Clark Anderson, and Duff McCullough, were Lawrenceville students.

176 TNW’s mother and youngest sister eventually rented Axeland House, near Horley, Sussex, for the summer.

177 TNW is referring to some items his father accidentally left behind during a visit to Lawrenceville.

178 TNW spent the weekend of February 25 and 26, 1928, at the Fitzgeralds’ rented house, Ellerslie, outside Wilmington, Delaware, where he met for the first time Fitzgerald, his wife, Zelda, and their only child, Frances Scott, who was called “Scottie.”

179 Among the guests at Ellerslie was Esther Murphy, sister of Gerald Murphy, the Fitzgeralds’ friend from their time in Paris and the Rviera.

180 Reginald “Rex” Lardner, brother of American writer and journalist Ringgold “Ring” Lardner, was, like his brother, a neighbor of the Fitzgeralds when the latter lived in Great Neck, New York, and was an editor for Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan magazine.

181 Fitzgerald’s story “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les” (1924) was reprinted in his collection All The Sad Young Men (1926).

182 TNW no doubt mentioned this because of Zelda’s interest in ballet. She began to take ballet lessons in Paris in the summer of 1925 and, while they were at Ellerslie, took classes with the director of the Philadelphia Opera ballet.

183 Townley graduated from Lawrenceville in 1923 and from Princeton in 1927.

184 In the original letter, the date appeared at the end of the letter.

185 The Woman of Andros.

186 In the original letter, the date appeared at the end of the letter.

187 Latin: see the press here and there.

Chapter 3

1 Porgy (1925), a novel by DuBose Heyward; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), a novel by Willa Cather; Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), a Pulitzer Prize—winning novel by Julia Peterkin; Tristram (1927), a Pulitzer Prize—winning narrative poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

2 The heroine of The Woman of Andros, Chrysis, was a hetaera, one of a class of highly cultivated courtesans in ancient Greece.

3 Latin: a naturally Christian soul.

4 TNW noted before the opening lines of his novel: “The first part of this novel is based upon the Andria, a comedy of Terence who in turn based his work upon two Greek plays, now lost to us, by Menander.” Fénelon (1651-1715) was a French prelate and writer.

5 TNW had written a preface for Philip Sassoon’s nonfiction book The Third Route, published in the United States in 1929.

6 Hemingway’s second novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published as Fiesta in England. A Farewell to Arms (1929) was published in six issues of Scribner’s magazine, from May through October 1929.

7 English publisher James Hamish Hamilton. The full Latin phrase is quorum magna pars fui, meaning “in which I played a great part.”

8 TNW may be referring to “The Breaking of Exile,” which survives as an incomplete manuscript and as a typescript carbon in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

9 9 Lewis was a society caterer and the owner of the raffish and idiosyncratic Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street in London. TNW may be referring to a bronze bust (1908) by sculptor Jacob Epstein. The subject, Nina Forrest, was an artist’s model and the wife of English painter Henry Lamb. Epstein called her Euphemia because she reminded him of the woman in Andrea Mantegna’s painting of Saint Euphemia.

10 Fitts was in the class of 1919 at Yale and edited the monthly literary journal S₄N, which was founded in 1919 and to which TNW contributed frequently before it ceased publication in 1925.

11 Argentine dancer Antonia Merce (1888-1936), whose stage name was La Argentina.

12 Italian: poor little person (this was an obvious reference to Chaplin’s role as the Little Tramp).

13 TNW is referring to the manuscript of The Woman of Andros.

14 TNW is referring to his family’s new home on Deepwood Drive in Hamden, Connecticut, then under construction.

15 TNW never wrote a play for English actress Edith Evans, and there is no record of her having appeared in any of his plays.

16 Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe.

17 Grace was the second wife of TNW’s uncle Thornton MacNess Niven III.

18 TNW owned stock in the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway.

19 The Hannas were Wilder family friends in Berkeley.

20 TNW is probably referring to the letter he received from T.E. Lawrence (see letter number 113).

21 Lawrence wrote TNW a letter on December 12, 1929, praising his two novels but criticizing him for “aiming a little below your strength, to convey a sense of ease,” in The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

22 Lawrence’s prose translation of the Odyssey appeared in 1932.

23 The Burgtheater of Vienna, founded in 1776, is one of the earliest and most important theaters in Europe.

24 Haidee Wright (1868-1943) was an English stage and film actress.

25 Charlotte had been selected as a resident at Yadoo, an artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she worked on her writing.

26 Mrs. Henry Seidel Canby, wife of the American critic and editor who was on the Yale faculty when TNW was an undergraduate.

27TNW’s brother would receive his Ph.D. from Yale in June 1933. TNW is referring to Mother and Four, Isabel Wilder’s first novel, which was published in 1933.

28 French: Finally I saw that he was preparing me for the delights of a farewell.

29 Ralph S. Lillie, a gifted pianist, was a professor of general physiology at the University of Chicago.

30 Stage producer and director Jed Harris (1900-1979) was romantically involved for many years with American stage and film actress and writer Ruth Gordon (1896-1985).

31 German: The beautiful Helena. TNW is referring to Max Reinhardts wife, German actress Helene Thimig (1889-1974).

32 32 TNW’s one-act play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, which was collected in his The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931), is among the most performed of his shorter plays. In its use of such theatrical devices as the Stage Manager and the absence of realistic scenery it anticipates his later full-length plays.

33 The House of Connelly, by Paul Green.

34 Helen McAfee, the editor of the Yale Review; Phyliss Trask and Dr. Williams were New Haven friends. The Fultons were TNW’s next-door neighbors on Deepwood Drive. Bailey was professor of surgery at the University of Chicago.

35 Astrid may be a reference to a family pet or may just be TNW being whimsical.

36 As depicted by Dante in the Inferno, Ugolino della Gherardesca (ca. 1220-1289) was accused of being a traitor to the city of Pisa, arrested, imprisoned, and left to starve in a tower with his sons and grandsons.

37 Franja, the eldest daughter of Robert and Maude Hutchins, was born in 1926.

38 Skinner was performing at Chicago’s Studebaker Theater at the time. Andrews may have been a Wilder family friend.

39 Mrs. Philip F. La Follette, the wife of Wisconsin’s governor, was referring to the bed that popular Norwegian violinist Ole Bornemann Bull probably slept in when visiting the governor’s house in the 1870s; it was henceforth called “the Ole Bull bed.”

40 Laughton played Hercule Poirot in The Fatal Alibi, a play by Michael Morton, and also directed the production. The Fatal Alibi was apparently playing in New Haven before its New York opening on February 8, 1932. In 1928, Isabel Wilder had graduated from Yale’s Department of Playwriting and Production, a forerunner of the Yale School of Drama.

41 Austrian stage and film actress Elisabeth Bergner (1897-1986) was a favorite of Max Reinhardt.

42 TNW’s translation of André Obey’s Le Viol de Lucrèce was titled Lucrèce.

43 Katharine Cornell’s touring production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1931) by Rudolf Besier was apparently playing in Chicago at this time.

44 Freedman of Brandt & Brandt was TNW’s dramatic agent from 1932 until Freedman’s death in 1966. A. Conger Goodyear frequently served as Cornell’s business representative.

45 Lederer (1899-2000) was a Czech film and stage actor. He appeared in New York in 1932 in C. L. Anthony’s Autumn Crocus.

46 Composer and music critic Deems Taylor wrote incidental music for the production of Lucrèce: American set designer Jones did the sets.

47 At the request of Gilbert Miller, TNW did a second version of Indig’s play, but when The Bride of Torozko opened in New York in September 1934, the adaptation was credited to Ruth Langner and TNW’s name was not associated with the production.

48 German: big-city.

49 American dramatist (1886-1946).

50 American dramatist (1890-1980).

51 Draper was the fiancée/lover of Lauro de Bosis (see letter number 67).

52 French literary critic (1882-1939). The book on Nietzsche that TNW mentions was never published.

53 French: to appear.

54 Friedell (1878-1938) was an Austrian philosopher, theater critic, and actor.

55 English literary critic and poet F. L. Lucas (1894-1967) was the author of Tragedy (1927).

56 French: a red Indian.

57 German lyric poet Eduard Friedrich Mörike (1804-1875).

58 Italian historian, and philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952).

59 Austrian dramatists Johann Nestroy (1801-1862) and Ferdinand Raimund (1790-1836). Nestroy’s play Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842) was adapted by TNW as The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), which, in turn, he revised as The Matchmaker (1954).

60 Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968).

61 Internationally renowned theatrical company established in Paris in 1930 by French actor and director Michel Saint-Denis, who produced a number of plays by André Obey.

62 Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni and Giacomo Casanova were both born in Venice in the 1700s.

63 TNW is referring to Alexander Woollcott, Katharine Cornell, and Gertrude Macy (Cornell’s general manager) and their upcoming trip to the home of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin.

64 American director, producer, and actor Guthrie McClintic (1893—1961), who was married to Katharine Cornell from 1921 until his death, coproduced (with Cornell) and directed Davis’s Jezebel in New York from December 1933 to January 1934, but Tallulah Bankhead was not in the cast.

65 American dramatist, novelist, and short story writer Margaret Ayer “Peggy” Barnes (1886-1967).

66 The Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934, known as “A Century of Progress,” was located on 424 acres of lakefront, close to downtown Chicago.

67 TNW’s youngest sister graduated from Mount Holyoke in June 1933. His brother received an honorary D.D. from Hamilton College, where he taught from 1930 to 1933. Isabel Wilder gave lectures during 1933-1934 on “Novel Reading and Novel Writing” and “The Modern Stage in America and Europe” under contract to the Lee Keedick Agency.

68 Ruth Gordon’s father, former sea captain Clifton Jones, had retired in Hawaii.

69 Jed Harris produced and directed The Lake, by Dorothy Massingham and Murray MacDonald, in New York between December 1933 and February 1934. Katharine Hepburn appeared in a starring role. He also produced and directed The Green Bay Tree, by Mordaunt Shairp, between October 1933 and March 1934.

70 French: our friend.

71 American dramatist Sidney Howard’s Alien Corn, directed by Guthrie McClintic and produced by and starring Katharine Cornell, was playing for a month in Chicago.

72 TNW is referring to Noël Coward, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and possibly prominent American physician Dr. Emanuel Libman.

73 American author and suffragette Janet Ayer Fairbank was Margaret Ayer Barnes’s older sister.

74 Mary Louise Cecilia “Texas” Guinan (1884-1933) was an American stage and film actress. During Prohibition, she had become a speakeasy hostess and was known for floor shows that consisted of scantily clad female dancers, whom she often took on the road.

75 Goldwyn produced We Live Again (1934), starring Russian-born film and stage actress Sten (1908-1993), whom Goldwyn had brought to the United States.

76 Film costume designer and couturier Gilbert Adrian (1903-1959), known simply as Adrian, designed costumes for many famous films; he also designed clothes for numerous wealthy women, including Mabel Dodge Luhan.

77 H. R. Knickerbocker, a well-known American journalist, was an international correspondent for Hearst’s International News Service. Martha Eccles Dodd (1908—1990) met TNW at the University of Chicago, where she studied for three and a half years before becoming assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune.

78 Woollcott’s “The Sage of Fountain Inn” appeared in the September 1933 issue of Cosmopolitan.

79 A brand of wood stain and paint.

80 The Dark Tower, written and directed by Woollcott and George S. Kaufman and produced by Sam H. Harris, ran in New York from November 1933 to January 1934. Harris also produced Dinner at Eight, by Kaufman and Edna Ferber, which ran in New York from October 1932 to May 1933.

81 A character in The Green Bay Tree, who was played by James Dale when Jed Harris’s production opened in October 1933.

82 Play (1929) by English dramatist Ashley Dukes.

83 Play (1921) by Somerset Maugham.

84 TNW is credited with being instrumental in introducing Orson Welles to the American stage.

85 John Thomas Pratt (1912-1986) became a costumer and set designer. He worked especially for African-American dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, whom he married in 1941.

86 Dana became TNW’s lawyer in early 1928; and he continued to represent him until 1951, the year Dana died.

87 TNW is referring to the trial of Dr. Alice Wynekoop, who had been accused of murdering her daughter-in-law, Rheta, in 1933.

88 TNW’s treatment of the Joan of Arc story for George Cukor and Merian C. Cooper was not used, but the script is in the George Cukor Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California, as well as in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. It was published in the October 2003 issue of the Yale Review.

89 Isabel Wilder’s second novel, Heart Be Still, was published in 1934.

90 French: customs.

91 TNW is referring to two other fictional treatments of the Joan of Arc story: Friedrich Schiller’s play Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801) and Percy MacKaye’s play Jeanne d’Arc (1906). The “British goddams” refers to English soldiers, and Cauchon was the bishop in charge of Joan of Arc’s trial.

92 TNW is referring to Black Mountain College, which opened in 1933. Its founder, John A. Rice, had been fired by Hamilton Holt, who was president of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, at the time. Some of the faculty and students at Rollins followed Rice to Black Mountain.

93 American writer Muriel Draper.

94 After a successful career as a drama critic and as the director of New York’s Provincetown Playhouse, Macgowan had gone to Hollywood as a story editor.

95 Harold Ickes, who offered Robert Maynard Hutchins the post, was secretary of the interior at the time. Dana’s partner was Frederick H. “Fritz” Wiggin. The firm was henceforth called Wiggin and Dana.

96 American opera singer Lawrence Tibbett and Spanish opera singer Lucrezia Bori.

97 German artist and former Bauhaus professor Albers (1888-1976) emigrated to the United States in 1933. He became a member of the faculty at Black Mountain College.

98 Robert B. Harshe was director of the Art Institute of Chicago at the time.

99 When We Live Again was released in 1934, screenwriting credit was given to Leonard Praskins, Maxwell Anderson, and Preston Sturges.

100 Ruth Gordon played three roles in the Theatre Guild’s production of James Bridie’s A Sleeping Clergyman (1933), which ran in New York from October to November 1934.

101 French: stronger than I.

102 Raimu was the stage name of French stage and film actor Jules-Auguste Muraire (1883-1946).

103 When the film Marie Antoinette, based on Zweig’s 1932 biography, appeared in 1938, Norma Shearer played the title role, but Laughton was not in the cast. He had declined the role, which was played by Robert Morley.

104 Laughton was in the films The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935).

105 The film TNW refers to in parentheses is Devil and the Deep (1932).

106 Ruth Gordon and Helen Hayes.

107 Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s wife.

108 This appears to be a secretarial transcription of TNW’s letter; the original letter has not been located.

109 Harper & Brothers acquired the rights from A. & C. Boni for four thousand dollars on August 29, 1934, for TNW’s new novel, Heaven’s My Destination, the third and last novel he had contracted to write for the Boni firm, and he was now free to become a Harper & Brothers author.

110 The National Recovery Administration, designed to help rebuild and strengthen the nation’s economy Hutchins did not take the job.

111 French: It’s beautiful! It’s very beautiful!

112 Hearst and Davies never made a film of Twelfth Night.

113 Uncle Pio, a character in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, is the actor-manager of “La Périchole,” a young girl he found singing in a tavern. Chrysis, a beautiful courtesan, is the major character in The Woman of Andros.

114 A Sleeping Clergyman opened on October 8, 1934.

115 Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., was an art patron and an important benefactor of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

116 American poet Witter Bynner (1881-1968) lived in Santa Fe for many years.

117 American photographer Ernest Knee (1907-1982); his wife, American painter Gina Knee (1898-1982); and, probably, American poet Daniel Clifford McCarthy, who in 1936 purchased Santa Fe’sVillagra Book Shop.

118 Boles was an American stage and film actor. Shields was an internationally ranked amateur tennis player who appeared in small film roles.

119 American poet and journalist Walter Willard “Spud” Johnson (1897-1968), who founded the small-press magazine Laughing Horse, also worked for a time as a secretary to both Witter Bynner and Mabel Dodge Luhan.

120 English artist Dorothy Brett (1883-1977), along with D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, went to Taos, New Mexico, in 1924 and became an integral part of the art colony there.

121 A friend from TNW’s days at Princeton in 1925-1926 (see letter number 89).

122 Because TNW’s father was ill, he was using private secretarial help.

123 This copy appears to be a secretarial transcription of TNW’s letter; the original letter has not been located.

124 Nothing came of this possible position for TNW

125 This is handwritten, presumably by a secretary in Dana’s office.

126 TNW is referring to Heaven’s My Destination, whose protagonist is George Brush.

127 Latin: God be with me.

128 TNW met American poet, novelist, and critic Gertrude Stein on November 25, 1934, when she spoke at the University of Chicago while on a lecture tour of the United States. President Hutchins invited her to return in March 1935 to teach a special course, with TNW to select her students.

129 Goethe was one of TNW’s lifelong intellectual heroes.

130 American journalist and writer (1891-1966). What prompted TNW’s letter to Gannett could not be determined.

131 Hebrew: “Pause and reflect!” (This word recurs frequently in TNW’s letters.)

132 The 1935 Exposition of Italian Art from Cimabue to Tiepolo, held at the Petit Palais in Paris.

133 Max Reinhardt’s lavish production of Goethe’s Faust was one of his most famous. TNW consulted with him on the script for this production.

134 TNW was traveling in Europe with Robert Frederick Davis, the young undergraduate student whose foreign study TNW supported (see letter number 137). TNW had arranged for Davis to study philosophy in Vienna.

135 TNW slightly misquoted John Milton’s “On His Being Arrived at the Age of 23”: “But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.”

136 Catherine Kerlin Wilder (1906-2006) lived in Geneva from 1929 until 1933. She worked summers for the American Committee for the League of Nations and taught at the International School there. She met TNW’s brother in Geneva.

137 Full name of American poet Doolittle (1886-1961), who used the pen name H. D. and was known for her interest in the Greek classics.

138 Viennese dialect: whipped cream.

139 Austrian dramatists Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872) and Johann Nestroy (1807-1862) and Austrian novelist Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868).

140 The rue de Fleurus is where Stein and Toklas lived in Paris.

141 German: formulation.

142 Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913).

143 The manuscript was Stein’s The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936), for which TNW wrote the introduction.

144 German: I kiss your hand.

145 Singer sewing machine heiress Daisy Fellowes (1890-1962) was a well-known fashionable socialite, and TNW is referring to Colette’s novel La Chatte (1933).

146 Joseph Hennessey was Woollcott’s adviser, manager, and closest friend.

147 Eleanora von Mendelssohn (1899-1951) was a German-born American actress.

148 Stockton (1834-1902) was an American novelist, short story writer, and editor.

149 Cerf (1898-1971) was the cofounder of Random House, Stein’s U.S. publisher.

150 The Woollcott Reader: Bypaths in the Realms of Gold (1935), a literary anthology, included TNW’s The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.

151 Lynn Fontanne played Katharina in a production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that ran in New York between September 1935 and January 1936.

152 H. Leggett Brown was Woollcott’s secretary.

153 From 1929 to 1942, Alexander Woollcott hosted “Town Crier,” a fifteen-minute weekly CBS radio show. When Cream of Wheat, Woollcott’s sponsor, did not renew his contract because of his criticism of Hitler and Mussolini, CBS persuaded Woollcott to stay on until they found another sponsor.

154 Ethan Frome had been in tryouts in Philadelphia before opening in New York on January 21. Lord, Gordon, and Massey were in the cast. Katharine Cornell had just appeared in Romeo and Juliet in New York and would star in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, scheduled to open in March.

155 Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865-1932) was one of the leading American actresses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Gabrielle Réjane (1857-1920) was an equally famous actress on the French stage in the same era.

156 Mr. Gilhooley, a play by Frank B. Elser, based on O’Flaherty’s 1926 novel, had been in tryouts before opening in New York in October 1930.

157 French: love life.

158 Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris (1935).

159 Hayes appeared in Victoria Regina (1934), by Laurence Housman, from December 1935 to June 1936.

160 Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost (1935) ran in New York from December 1935 to February 1936.

161 Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), author of Pensieri (1845).

162 Iris Origo (1902-1988), author of Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (1935).

163 Harris did not produce Elizabeth la Femme Sans Homme, by André Josset.

164 TNW may be referring to Guitry’s memoir If Memory Serves (1935).

165 TNW is undoubtedly referring to the diary of the French cleric Abbé Arthur Mugnier (1853-1944). Mugnier’s diary covers the years 1879-1939 and offers portraits of such literary figures as Marcel Proust, Anatole France, and Jean Cocteau.

166 Charlotte Wilder’s first book of poetry, Phases of the Moon, was published in 1936; it was the cowinner of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award.

167 TNW did not return to Hollywood at this time. Norma Shearer never made a screen version of Pride and Prejudice; nor did Charles Laughton ever play Benjamin Franklin in a film.

168 TNW had sailed for the Caribbean on October 9.

169 TNW’s sister was studying for her Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Chicago.

170 TNW was going to Berea College in Kentucky, where he had spent the summer of 1917 working on the farm there, to visit Robert Maynard Hutchins’s parents, William J. Hutchins, the president of Berea, and his wife. William J. Hutchins had been a professor of homiletics at Oberlin College when TNW and Robert Maynard Hutchins were students there, and TNW often visited the Hutchins’s home during that time.

171 Gladys Campbell (1892-1992), a student of TNW’s in Chicago, was an educator and a poet, taught at the University of Chicago and at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, and presided over a poetry club in Chicago that TNW attended.

172 Ralph S. and Helen M. Lillie (see letter number 116).

173 TNW replaced Frederick Paul Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation, as the American delegate to the Second General Conference of National Committees for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, which met in Paris in July 1937. Edouard Herriot (1872-1957) had served three terms as premier of France, the last of which was in 1932.

174 Spanish diplomat, historian, and writer Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo (1886-1978). French: “The President (Paul Valéry) hopes that you will speak after Mr. Madariaga.”

175 Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), British classical scholar.

176 French: the golden book of Paris (the official guest book in the City Hall).

177 French: Foreign Affairs Ministry.

178 French: lime-blossom tea.

179 Romains (1885-1972) was a French novelist, dramatist, and poet; Duhamel (1884-1966) was a French dramatist, novelist, critic, and poet.

180 French: I couldn’t care less.

181 Marie-Louise Bousquet, a journalist famous for her artistic salon, was the editor of the French edition of Harper’s Bazaar Régnier (1864-1936) was a French Symbolist poet.

182 TNW is referring to the unhappy end of a romance in which Isabel had been involved.

183 When this letter was written, Isabel was thirty-seven, not thirty-six.

184 TNW no doubt meant the Italian cosÎ cosÎ: so-so.

185 Lucy Tal was the wife of TNW’s first German publisher.

186 Stein’s and Toklas’s Chihuahua.

187 German: Children.

188 The enclosure has not survived.

189 “Nestroy-Molière” refers to TNW’s reworking of Johann Nestroy’s play Einen Jux will er sich machen into his play The Merchant of Yonkers, which also included TNW’s reworking of a scene from French dramatist Molière’s 1668 play L’Avare (The Miser). “The Prince of Baghdad” refers to a play TNW worked on throughout the rest of the 1930s; it has not survived.

190 At social gatherings, Lewis enjoyed impersonating people by performing mimicking monologues.

191 As reflected in the play’s title, TNW considered Horace Vandergelder the most important character in The Merchant of Yonkers and Mrs. Levi the second most important.

192 TNW’s translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, drawn heavily from German sources and starring Ruth Gordon, had its premiere performance at the Central City (Colorado) Opera House on July 17, 1937, followed in the fall by a successful thirteen-week pre—New York tour that ended in Chicago. During its run, it was described not as a translation or adaptation but as a “new acting version.” TNW was paid eventually.

193 TNW completed the manuscript of Our Town on Long Island, but he continued rewrites during rehearsals in New York.

194 Craven played the lead role of the Stage Manager in the premiere production of Our Town, produced and directed by Jed Harris, which played in New York for 336 performances between February and November 1938. TNW signed the production contract on January 12, 1938, ten days before the play opened at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.

195 TNW’s version of A Doll’s House opened in New York on December 27 and played for 144 performances, closing in May 1938.

196 Catharine Dix Wilder was born on January 31, 1937.

197 Charlotte Wilder’s novel was never published and it has not survived. Isabel Wilder’s third novel, Let Winter Go, was published in September 1937.

198 TNW frequently changed the titles of his play projects as well as the numbering of them when he referred to them in his correspondence. Play “#3” may be the one variously referred to as “Haroun al-Raschid,” “Arabian Nights,” “The Diamond of Baghdad,” “The Prince of Baghdad,” and “The Hell of the Vizier Kabäar.” The latter survives as an incomplete holograph manuscript, dated 1937. Play “#4” may refer to “Homage to P. G. Wodehouse,” act 1 of which survives in two versions in holograph manuscript, dated 1952-1953; or it may refer to an early outline of what became The Alcestiad, or A Life in the Sun (1955). The evolution of this latter play can be traced from undated fragments in holograph notebooks to the corrected typescripts (dated 1955), all of which survive in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, as do all the other manuscript materials mentioned above.

199 This limited edition of Our Town was never published.

200 Mrs. Gibbs was played by Evelyn Varden; Mrs. Webb was played by Helen Carew.

201 TNW made slight revisions in the text of Our Town before publishing it.

202 TNW probably meant the French raissonable: reasonable.

203 The tarantella that Ruth Gordon, playing Nora, performed in act 3 of the 1937-1938 production of A Doll’s House was choreographed by Martha Graham.

204 S. N. Behrman’s Wine of Choice, starring Woollcott, ran in New York in February and March 1938, but Hopkins did not appear in the New York cast.

205 German: brilliant.

206 TNW may be referring to Having Wonderful Time, produced and directed by Marc Connelly which was running in New York at the time.

207 Edward P. Goodnow was the production stage manager of Our Town.

208 Professor Willard was played by Arthur Allen; Mr. Webb was played by Thomas W. Ross.

209 In the early morning of January 24, 1938, Pinchot, who was Jed Harris’s personal assistant and lover and who had designed some of the costumes for Our Town, committed suicide.

210 Scott made her Broadway debut in the role of Emily Webb.

211 The production of Wine of Choice, in which Woollcott starred, opened in New York without playing in New Haven.

212 Edward Sheldon.

213 French: sorcerer’s apprentice.

214 The Variety review of the January 22, 1938, performance of Our Town in Princeton, signed Rosen and titled “Plays Out of Town: Our Town,” appeared on January 26 and called TNW’s play “not only disappointing but hopelessly slow” and predicted that it “will probably go down as the season’s most extravagant waste of fine talent.”

215 The Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar, produced by Orson Welles, was playing in Boston at the time.

216 Codman was a Boston Brahmin, who later became well-known as an aide to General Patton in World War II.

217 At one point, Jed Harris had taken an option on Hemingway’s play The Fifth Column, but eventually he bowed out of the project. The play was adapted and heavily altered by Benjamin Glazer for a Broadway production in the spring of 1940.

218 Captain Rollin Dart, a former Loyalist officer in Spain, was appointed by Hemingway to represent him in negotiating for stage productions of The Fifth Column while Hemingway was in Spain covering the Spanish Civil War.

219 Widow of George Pierce Baker, who, after teaching playwriting at Harvard, moved to Yale in 1925 and helped found the Yale School of Drama.

220 Jed Harris’s business manager. The money was apparently stolen by a member of Harris’s staff; Harris made good on the loss.

221 TNW’s Hollywood agent.

222 Abraham Sofaer played Shylock.

223 De Cordoba was in the original cast of TNW’s Lucrèce in 1932-1933.

224 The Blue Bird (1908), a play by Maurice Maeterlinck; TNW helped Reinhardt touch up his production of the play in California.

225 TNW played the Stage Manager in Our Town in New York for two weeks in September 1938.

226 Actor and film director Otto Preminger, who began his career working with Max Reinhardt in Vienna.

227 Golden Boy and Union Pacific were both released in 1939; TNW did not appear in the screen-writing credits for either film.

228 Anna English Dana was J. Dwight Dana’s wife.

229 Einstein had written TNW a letter, in which he praised Our Town.

230 Figaro, Leporello, and Papageno are characters in Mozart operas.

231 Cowl played Mrs. Levi in the premiere production of The Merchant of Yonkers.