The Wilder Family

From the Thornton Wilder Society Website:

Young Wilder Family small.jpg
The Wilder Family in Madison Wisconsin, circa 1906. (L-R) Amos, Amos Parker, Isabel, Charlotte, Isabella, Thornton. YCAL.
The Wilder family did not just produce one brilliant writer and thinker. The entire family was, by any measure, filled with successful and highly educated and accomplished people. Thornton Wilder's father, Amos Parker Wilder, was a newspaper owner and editor, a powerful speaker, and the United States Consul General to Hong Kong and Shanghai. His mother, Isabella Niven Wilder, was a cultured, educated woman who instilled a love of literature, drama and languages in her children, and who wrote vivid poetry. Thornton's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, was a highly acclaimed professor of New Testament scholarship, an insightful essayist, and a distinguished poet, as well as a tennis champion. Sister Charlotte was a professor of English and an award-winning poet. Sister Isabel was the author of three popular novels and the curator of Yale University's theater archive. The youngest Wilder sibling, Janet Wilder Dakin, was a professor of biology, an author, and a noted environmentalist. Indeed, the Wilder family made its mark across generations and in many different fields.


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