Biography of Thornton Wilder

Coming in 2012!

Penelope Niven's biography of Thornton Wilder will be published by HarperCollins in 2012. Thanks to extensive archives becoming available only recently, her work will be the first biography to draw on anything like the full record of Wilder's life.


Niven is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen, and co-author with James Earl Jones of Voices and Silences, called a classic on acting. Her biography for children, Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet, was awarded the International Reading Association Prize for distinguished literature for children. She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Thornton Wilder Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, and the North Carolina Award in Literature, among other honors.