Three Plays: Our Town, The Skin Of Our Teeth, And The Matchmaker

Description

"Thornton Wilder will survive. . . as long as there are people around who are willing to sit in something called a theater and be reminded of their common humanity." -New York Times From celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright Thornton Wilder, three of the greatest plays in American literature together in one volume: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker. This essential compendium includes a preface by the author, as well as a foreword by playwright John Guare. Our Town, Wilder's timeless Pulitzer Prize-winning classic about love, death, and destiny, opened on Broadway in 1938 and continues to be celebrated and performed on stages all around the world. The Skin of our Teeth, Wilder's brilliant and enduring romp about human follies and human endurance starring the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey, earned Wilder his third Pulitzer Prize in 1943. The Matchmaker, a dazzling farce about money and love, stars the irrepressible busybody Dolly Gallagher Levi, who leads young and old on an adventure that changes their lives. It was later adapted into the famed musical Hello, Dolly!

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