As HarperCollins completes its Thornton Wilder Library reprinting of the author’s novels and plays along with releases of them in audio and digital formats, we are pleased to add our current issue to the ongoing celebrations of Wilder’s one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday. In it, you can find previously unpublished Wilder correspondence, new and exciting Wilder scholarship, and interviews with theater practitioners influenced by Wilder. Also included are reviews of performances of Wilder’s plays from the first post-pandemic theater season. Tested by time and the pandemic, Wilder’s writing continues to inspire writers, theater directors, scholars, and audiences because he asks all of us to “Pay Attention!”
We open the issue with an epistolary account of a literary friendship between Thornton Wilder and Timothy Findley, one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s, who was a novelist, dramatist, and actor. Findley’s biographer, Sherrill Grace, has carefully edited sixteen...