Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), American author, whose plays and novels, usually based on allegories and myths, have reached a worldwide audience through various versions.

Wilder was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Oberlin College and Yale University. While teaching, he achieved success as both a novelist and a playwright. In his compelling novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927; awarded the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), Wilder united the lives of a disparate group of travellers in colonial Peru through a single event, the disaster in which they die. His other novels include The Ides of March (1948), an epistolary work about Julius Caesar, and The Eighth Day (1967), about the events surrounding a murder. For the latter work Wilder was awarded the 1968 National Book Award. Theophilus North (1973) is a group of short stories.

Wilder's direct, accessible style also works well in drama. His first play, the allegorical The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), preceded a long list of popular one-act plays and translations. An enduring work of American drama is Our Town (1938), a touching look at small-town American life that brought Wilder the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was theatrically experimental for its time, performed on a stage without scenery or props, using stepladders to represent the upstairs of a house and folding chairs to indicate a graveyard. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), a humorous view of human life through the ages, won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

One of Wilder's most successful works, The Matchmaker (1954), derived ultimately from a 19th-century English farce, was made into a film in 1958 and adapted in 1964 as the musical comedy Hello, Dolly!, which was in turn filmed in 1969. Wilder died on December 7, 1975, in Hamden, Connecticut.