"Wait til I'm Dead." A Colloquium on the Fiction of Thornton Wilder

"...Or wait til I'm dead: they say it's really possible to find a unified theme in an author when he's stopped writing (dead or senile)."

--Thornton Wilder to George F. Edmonds, April 14, 1972

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) received three Pulitzer Prizes - for The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. His plays today are collectively produced at least twice every day of the year; but his novels, although all in print, have attracted far less attention. On the occasion of the landmark publication by the Library of America of Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926-1948, scholars in classics and American literature, journalists, biographers, and family members participate in a one-day program of lectures, panels, interviews, and readings that will try to place Wilder's fiction in American literary history and culture.

Participating in the Wilder Colloquium will be:

Jackson R. Bryer - Co-editor of The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Michael Dirda - Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic
Judith P. Hallett - Professor of Classics, University of Maryland
Jeremy McCarter - Senior Writer for Arts, Culture and Entertainment, Newsweek
J. D. McClatchy - Editor of the Library of America volume
Penelope Niven - Author of a forthcoming biography of Wilder
Kurt Raaflaub - Professor Emeritus of Classics, Brown University
Martha Nell Smith - Professor of English, University of Maryland
Cecelia Tichi - William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
Christopher Wheatley - Professor of English, Catholic University of America
Tappan Wilder -Thornton Wilder's nephew and Literary Executor

Sponsored by the Departments of English and Classics and the Center for
Literary and Comparative Studies of the University of Maryland, College Park;
the Classical Association of the Atlantic States; and the Thornton Wilder Society

For more information, contact, Judith P. Hallett at jeph@umd.edu .