Thornton Wilder

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where his father was
serving as American consul general in Shanghai (Goldstone 11). He was then
schooled at Berkeley, California; Chefoo, China; and Ojai, California
before completing high school back at Berkeley in 1915. He studied the
classics at Oberlin College and Yale University, where he received his
Bachelor of Arts degree in 1919 (Unger 356). Wilder spent a year as a
resident of the American Academy at Rome, where he began writing The Cabala.
Back in the United States he taught French at Lawrenceville High School in
New Jersey from 1921-1928 and began doing graduate work at Princeton, where
he took his Master of Arts degree in 1926. The Cabala was issued as a novel
that year, but was largely ignored by the critics.
"Although over-age when America entered World War II, Wilder sought
military assignment...and served in Air Force Intelligence in the United
States, North Africa and Italy" (Block and Shedd 959). America's
involvement in World War II changed Wilder's ...

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and with inspired imagination (Unger 370). The work is
vast in both dimension and scope; its lines bounce with energy, sparkle
with wit, and exult in the joy of living. Here at length, Wilder's military
experiences and background is capitalized upon in a marvelous and
complicated unity (Goldstone 174). His religious knowledge and training are
explicitly displayed. These influences are dramatically presented in the
dilemma of normal humanity faced with the recurrent brutalities of fascism,
nazism and communism (Unger 370). Henry, the voice of such systems, cries,
"I'm going to be free even if I have to kill half the world for it" (Wilder
196). At the sight of him, normal humanity ...

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