“If farce is a trivial untruth about life, our betters must be reprehended,” Thornton Wilder wrote a Wellesley College theater company producing Merchant after World War II. Wilder remained proud to the end of his life for having contributed to an ancient and honorable theatrical tradition devoted to laughter. For this reason, no review of Merchant/Matchmaker could have pleased him more than Walter Kerr’s in the New York Herald Tribune the morning after its second coming on Broadway:

Though he has nominally based his spectacular spree on a particular German comedy by Johann Nestroy, he has actually been busy taking a veritable inventory of the comic spirit, itemizing all the dives into cupboards, all the absurd uprushings of love, and even all the picture-postcard settings that have ever done duty in the cause of merriment.

TAPPAN WILDER

Sausalito, CA

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON SOURCES

The back matter for this volume is constructed in large part from Thornton Wilder’s words in published material not easy to come by. Unless otherwise identified, all unpublished material and many of the news clips are from holdings in the Wilder Family Archives in the Yale Collection of American Literature in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale (YCAL), or records held by the Wilder family. Wilder’s legal and dramatic agency files have been especially useful sources for telling the story. When deemed appropriate, minor corrections of spelling, punctuation, and format have been made silently. Wilder’s correspondence with Lady Sybil Colefax is held in Special Collections, The Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University, and his letters to Ruth Gordon by the Garson Kanin Estate.

PUBLICATIONS

The Reinhardt citation is from Huntly Carter’s The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914). Donald Haberman’s quote is taken from The Plays of Thornton Wilder: A Critical Study (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 23; Richard Maney’s from Fanfare: The Confessions of a Press Agent (New York: Harper & Row 1957), 329; and the quoted lines from The Merchant of Yonkers (New York: Harper & Brothers), 173, 180. Wilder’s lyrics appeared in “Old Father Hudson” published by W. A. Quincke & Co., Hollywood, CA, 1939.

An earlier version of this Afterword appeared in the 2006 HarperCollins edition of Three Plays. Since that time, two foundational works for understanding Thornton Wilder’s life and art have been published by HarperCollins: Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer edited The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (2008) and Penelope Niven’s definitive Wilder biography, Thornton Wilder: A Life (2012). Readers interested in learning more about Wilder are invited to consult these two important texts. We also invite readers to visit www.thorntonwilder.com for extensive materials including theater programs, photos, Wilder’s 1938 essay, “Noting the Nature of Farce,” his preface to Three Plays, and his Foreword to Johann Nestroy: Three Comedies, translated by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry (New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1967). The Beaux’ Stratagem, referenced in Ken Ludwig’s Introduction, is published by Samuel French (2007), and The Bride of Torozko has not yet been published.