The Cabala and The Woman of Andros

The Cabala and The Woman of Andros PDF

Author: Thornton Wilder

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0063244500

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“For much of the twentieth century, these remarkable early novels were hidden in the great shadow of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Now we can examine them in the spotlight for the gifts that they are—memorable monuments to style and keys to understanding Wilder’s genius.” – Penelope Niven, Thornton Wilder Biographer Featuring a foreword by Penelope Niven and a revealing afterword by Wilder’s nephew, Tappan, this reissue reintroduces the reader to the Thornton Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala, and to The Woman of Andros, one of the inspirations for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town. A young American student spends a year in the exotic world of post-World War I Rome. While there, he experiences firsthand the waning days of a secret community (a "cabala") of decaying royalty, a great cardinal of the Roman Church, and an assortment of memorable American ex-pats. The Cabala, a semiautobiographical novel of unforgettable characters and human passions, launched Wilder's career as a celebrated storyteller and dramatist. The Woman of Andros, set on the obscure Greek island of Brynos before the birth of Christ, explores universal questions of what is precious about life and how we live, love, and die. Eight years later, Wilder would pose the same questions on the stage in a play titled Our Town, also set in an obscure location, this time a village in New Hampshire. The Woman of Andros is celebrated for some of the most beautiful writing in American literature.

The Cabala

The Cabala PDF

Author: Thornton Wilder

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2022-01-01

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 150407324X

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A young American in Rome encounters a mysterious cohort of aristocrats in the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s debut novel. In love with all things classical, the narrator of Thornton Wilder’s The Cabala is entranced by the timeless city of Rome. With the Great War finally over, he’s spending a year among Rome’s salons and cafes. But he only comes to understand the grand and crumbling metropolis when a friend introduces him to a secret society of intellectuals known as the Cabala. Charmed by the young American, the elegant and idiosyncratic members of the Cabala give him the nickname Samuele. He soon becomes their confidant and go-between, privy to their intimate dramas, scandals, and insecurities. As living embodiments of ancient gods, these peculiar characters impress upon Samuele that nothing in life is truly eternal. The Cabala is a semiautobiographical novel based on Thornton Wilder’s time at the American Academy in Rome during the 1920s. First published in 1926, it launched his reputation as one of his generation’s finest storytellers.

A Thornton Wilder Trio

A Thornton Wilder Trio PDF

Author: Thornton Wilder

Publisher:

Published: 1956

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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"Each of the novels is a special achievement, different in its own fashion from any other novels written at the time, or since. The Woman of Andros is a Greek pastoral as beautifully handled as the figures on a Greek vase. It contrasts with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is a fable (perhaps more Buddhist than Christian in its feeling), as much as with The Cabala, which is an album of boldly depicted characters. All three novels, different as they are from one another, have something in common besides their economy of statement and their felicity of style. Perhaps it is the quality that was praised by Henry James in his little book on Hawthorne. There he said, speaking of The Scarlet Letter, 'It has about it that charm, very hard to express, which we find in an artist's work the first time he has touched his highest mark--a sort of straightness and naturalness of execution, and unconsciousness of his public, and freshness of interest in his theme.' These books have that quality too, and they ask to be reread."--From back cover.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey PDF

Author: Thornton Wilder

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 103

ISBN-13: 0593470958

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This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novel—by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth—has been beloved around the world for nearly a century. This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individuals—a noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a child—come to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined lives—snuffed out in one shattering moment—illuminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.

Thornton Wilder in Collaboration

Thornton Wilder in Collaboration PDF

Author: Jackson R. Bryer

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-12-17

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1527523640

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The essays in this volume evolved from papers presented at the Second International Thornton Wilder Conference, held at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, in June 2015. They examine Wilder’s work as both playwright and novelist, focusing upon how he drew on the collaborative mode of creativity required in the theatre, when writing both drama and fiction. The book’s authors use the term “collaboration” in its broadest sense, at times in response to Wilder’s critics who faulted him for “borrowing” from other, earlier, literary works rather than recognizing these “borrowings” as central to the artistic process of collaboration. In exploring Wilder’s collaborative efforts of different kinds, the essays not only consider how Wilder worked with and revised earlier literary texts and the ideas central to those texts, but also analyze how Wilder worked with and inspired other creative individuals and how recent productions of Wilder’s plays, both in the US and abroad, have been the products of unique forms of collaboration.

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