Gentleman of Rio [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONThornton Wilder belongs to the liberal tradition of authorship, a way of writing which is scholarly without being academic, and of wide appeal without being facile in the popular sense. He is primarily a humanist and his interests are culturalman's spiritual history throughout the ages, the moral problems which have confronted him, and, in particular, his predicament in the modern world. This would be formidable were it not that Wilder tempers his substance with brisk humour and genial irony, and writes with a fine ear both for verbal echoes from the past and the vulgar idiom of to-day. He is not therefore a "pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming", or a professor with a sociological thesis to present, but a literary artist of great range and sensibility.Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1897, son of a newspaper editor and grandson of a minister of religion. When his father became consul-general in the U.S. State Department, Wilder, from the age of nine, attended schools in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and continuing in California, began his undergraduate studies at Oberlin College. After serving in the first war he graduated Bachelor of Arts from Yale and spent a year in the American Academy in Rome before taking a higher degree at Princeton in 1926. Vll