Thornton Wilder Books in Order

American student Samuele spends a year in postwar Rome, moving among fading aristocrats, expatriates, and a powerful cardinal. As an old social circle begins to unravel, he gets a close look at passion, status, and loneliness.

When a bridge collapses in eighteenth-century Peru, Brother Juniper investigates the lives of the five people who died. His search for a pattern in the disaster becomes a moving story about love, loss, faith, and chance.

This early collection gathers brief plays drawing on biblical stories, history, myth, and the arts. Wilder approaches spiritual questions with wit and theatrical playfulness rather than sermons, often finding moral tension in a single charged encounter.

A New Jersey family drives to visit a married daughter after a devastating loss. Their ordinary roadside talk, shared memories, and small jokes make the short trip a tender portrait of family life under pressure.

On a small Greek island before the birth of Christ, the courtesan Chrysis watches a respectable family's crisis unfold. Love, an unexpected child, and rigid ideas about class force the island's residents to question what decency really means.

A collection of six one-act plays, including *The Long Christmas Dinner*, *Pullman Car Hiawatha*, and *The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden*. Wilder uses simple staging to make room for family, time, travel, love, and loss.

George Brush, a fervently moral young textbook salesman, travels through Depression-era America determined to do the right thing. His comic misadventures test his beliefs, his patience, and his ability to understand people unlike himself.

In Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, young neighbors Emily Webb and George Gibbs grow up, marry, and face life's changes. Guided by the Stage Manager, this spare play finds wonder and heartbreak in everyday routines.

A wealthy Yonkers merchant sets out to find a wife, while his employees pursue plans of their own. This early comedy became the foundation for Wilder's later revision, *The Matchmaker*.

In a London music hall, a desperate young man mistakes obsession for love and threatens suicide after being rejected. The dancer he pursues, her aunt, and a weary comedian try to teach him what love actually asks.

The Antrobus family survives an ice age, a flood, and a war while somehow remaining recognizably suburban. Wilder's funny, restless play jumps across history to ask how people keep rebuilding after disaster.

Wilder's brief memorial essay considers the life and work of James Joyce soon after the Irish writer's death. It offers a compact view of Joyce's importance from a fellow novelist deeply engaged with modern literature.

A compact three-scene dramatic work that offers a lesser-known example of Wilder's theatrical experimentation. Its brief form invites readers to focus on dialogue, shifting perspective, and the pressure of ideas played out onstage.

Through invented letters, reports, and private papers, Wilder reimagines Julius Caesar's final months in Rome. Caesar, Cleopatra, Cicero, and others navigate love, power, ambition, and political danger as the republic strains toward catastrophe.

Dolly Levi, a sharp-witted widow, arranges romances and business deals in nineteenth-century Yonkers. When a rich merchant goes looking for a bride, Dolly turns his plans into a fast-moving farce about money, appetite, and marriage.

Apollo visits the three Fates, who hold the threads of human lives, hoping to save King Admetus. Wine, a riddle, and a dangerous bargain turn this Greek-inspired satyr play into a comic look at death and sacrifice.

Two babies in Central Park speak with startling adult insight while their caregivers trade advice and pursue their own concerns. Wilder turns infancy upside down in a playful comedy about need, dependence, and misunderstanding.

In an Illinois mining town, John Barrington Ashley is convicted of murdering his neighbor, then escapes before execution. The consequences spread through both families, turning a mystery into a wide-ranging story of survival, loyalty, and renewal.

A young man bound for adventure is stranded in Newport, Rhode Island, when his car breaks down. Taking jobs as a tutor, coach, confidant, and more, Theophilus North becomes entangled with wealthy households and the town's hidden corners.

Wilder reworks the Greek legend of Alcestis, who agrees to die in place of her husband, King Admetus. The drama follows their bargain through questions of devotion, fear, duty, and what a life together is worth.

This collection gathers Wilder's essays and lectures on American culture, theater, reading, and writers including James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. It also shows the curious, practical mind behind his novels, translations, and plays.

Wilder's journals record more than two decades of work, travel, friendships, theater, and private reflection. Readers see notes from the years surrounding his wartime service and the making of later plays and fiction.

This correspondence traces a lively literary friendship between Thornton Wilder and Gertrude Stein. Their letters move through books, theater, travel, mutual friends, and the practical concerns that shape a writing life.

A broad selection of Wilder's novels, plays, stories, essays, and letters. It offers a convenient way to sample the range of his work, from *The Bridge of San Luis Rey* and *Our Town* to his reflective nonfiction.

The first volume of Wilder's short plays brings together the 1931 one-acts and later works from his planned cycles on the ages of life and the deadly sins. It is a broad introduction to his compact, inventive theater.

This second volume gathers early playlets, previously unpublished work, and *The Alcestiad* with its satyr play *The Drunken Sisters*. It shows Wilder returning to religion, myth, comedy, and formal experiment in short dramatic forms.

A collection of Wilder's versions of plays by writers including Ibsen, Sartre, André Obey, and George Farquhar. It reveals his interest in bringing older and foreign drama into direct, performable English.

This volume collects Thornton Wilder's letters with James Joyce scholar Adaline Glasheen about *Finnegans Wake*. Their exchange follows the pleasures and puzzles of close reading one of modern literature's most demanding books.

A selection of Wilder's letters to family, friends, fellow writers, and theater people. The correspondence offers a personal route through his work, travels, teaching, wartime service, and long habit of thinking on the page.

Three children play at being orphans while their parents watch, join in, and lose control of the game. This unsettling comedy lets family roles blur until hidden grievances and desires come plainly into view.

Four short plays, *Infancy*, *Childhood*, *Youth*, and *The Rivers Under the Earth*, follow Wilder's planned journey through life's stages. The pieces use comedy, fantasy, and role reversal to examine growing up and growing older.

This group of short plays uses the seven deadly sins as a framework for comic and unsettling human behavior. Wilder's characters confront pride, envy, lust, gluttony, and other impulses in sharply drawn theatrical situations.

Fresh from prison, crooked financier Walbeck returns to a Chicago home he no longer controls. His new cook Bernice, herself marked by a violent past, offers advice as he faces the possible return of his daughter.

Passengers travel overnight from New York to Chicago in 1930, sharing a train car with time, weather, towns, planets, and death. Wilder uses a bare stage to turn a rail journey into a meditation on fleeting lives.

An aging Saint Francis returns to Assisi and confronts memories of the reckless young man he once was. Wilder's brief drama links an old love, guilt, and religious devotion in a searching story about desire and forgiveness.

Captain Gulliver is stranded in a country ruled by the young, where anyone nearing thirty is treated as an enemy. This satirical fantasy pits youthful certainty against experience, then asks whether either generation can live without the other.

Wilder's acting version of Henrik Ibsen's drama follows Nora Helmer as a secret from her past threatens her marriage. The adaptation keeps the pressure on Nora's growing realization that her home has been built on unequal terms.

This collection centers on *Our Town* and pairs it with other Wilder plays. It gives readers a useful entry into his plainspoken stagecraft, his comic turns, and his lasting interest in daily life, time, and community.

A New Jersey family drives to visit a married daughter after a devastating loss. Their ordinary roadside talk, shared memories, and small jokes make the short trip a tender portrait of family life under pressure.

Three of Wilder's major plays appear together: the small-town drama *Our Town*, the marriage farce *The Matchmaker*, and the survival comedy *The Skin of Our Teeth*. The volume shows how widely he could range while keeping people at the center.