In 1965 Thornton Wilder(1887-1975) won the National Medal for Literature. This medal is and was an annual award to honour the achievements of an American writer and their literary career. The award was established by the National Book Committee, a non-profit educational society founded in the USA in 1954. Wilder started writing The Eighth Day, the novel for which he won the award, in 1962, the year I began my travelling-pioneering life for the Canadian Baha�i community. The Eighth Day was Wilder�s longest novel. Wilder won the award the year I finally decided what direction to go in as a career. I was 21 at the time, studying sociology at McMaster university and living in the small town of Dundas in Ontario�s Golden Horseshoe. The career I had chosen in late 1965 was teaching and it would be among Canada�s Inuit. When Wilder died in 1975 I was teaching in Melbourne Australia, was deeply involved in Baha�i community activities, but his writing had scarcely touched my reading inventory. In 2009, though, the year that the Library of America republished his first five novels, six early short stories and four essays on fiction in one volume, I had been retired from FT, PT and all casual-volunteer work and had become, myself, a writer. Wilder, a three time Pulitzer Prize winner had become, by then, someone whose writing I had come to appreciate. -Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 15 July 2010.
Your journals deserve a place with
those of Emerson and Thoreau and
my own journals, Thornton, what do
you think will become of them? You
write in a rare, unique and matchless
form: a nonesuch as Garson Kanin put
it---it�s a rare reader who won�t enjoy
your delightful words. If I can provide
such intimate glimpses into my private
writing life, if I have only some of your
agile mind and wry view of life----they
will be as illuminating as they try to be
a documentary into my life and times.(1)
(1) Leon Edel�s commentary on The Journals of Thornton Wilder: 1939-1961
Ron Price
15 July 2010
