Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975). American novelist and playwright. Born in Madison, WI, and educated partially abroad because his father was a diplomat, Wilder graduated from Yale University in 1920. His second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), a historical novel set in seventeenth-century Peru, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Leftist critics attacked his The Woman of Andros (1930), set in pre-Christian Greece, for avoiding contemporary life and the Great Depression. He responded with Heaven’s My Destination (1935), featuring a depression-era salesman of religious textbooks traveling across America. Our Town (1938), his play about the fictional Grovers Corners (modeled after Peterborough, NH), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama. In the summer of 1926 Cather and Wilder met when they were both residents of the MacDowell Writers’ Colony in Peterborough. She saw Our Town performed on Broadway and to playwright Zoë Akins praised Wilder’s “very fine” representation of New England life and his technique in getting a “fine poem…onto the stage successfully” (#1407). She wrote him a fan letter telling him she loved “everything you have ever written, but you have done nothing so fine” as Our Town (#2014). Except for a time working in military intelligence in World War II, Wilder continued to be an active playwright and novelist until the end of his life. He died in Hamden, CT.