This essay provides annotations for recent Wilder scholarship. It is organized in chronological order and focuses on publications from the beginning of 2016 to the beginning of 2020. In examining this material, it is striking to note yet again the extent to which Wilder traverses so many influences, theoretical stances, genres, and geographies. In two separate articles he is referred to as a mediator—someone who can move between seemingly disparate ideas, genres, and philosophies with sophistication and ease, bringing enlightenment and meaning to whatever he is discussing. Something which also consistently emerges from this scholarship is the theme of Wilder as a democratizing and unifying author: someone who writes in ways that can speak to and relate to many, someone willing and able to collaborate with others, and someone whose work crosses multiple disciplines. He was a novelist, a playwright, an essayist, and a screenwriter. He was a philosopher, a friend, a cosmopolitan, a theologian. As these brief summaries indicate, his writing seems to speak as loudly in the twenty-first century as when it was first written.Diakoulakis provides a fascinating look into the philosophies and theories surrounding death: Is death a result of chance or is it a result of some sort of divine death sentence? How does the very nature of faith inform and affect our views of death? He investigates the deaths of the five people depicted in Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, exploring Brother Juniper's pursuit to determine whether the deaths of these characters are due to some great happenstance or if they die due to a calculated decision of a Creator, possibly because of a sin or failing within each person. Diakoulakis leads the reader through the ways in which Juniper's search ends up complicating the very essence of faith itself; faith is inevitably believing the unbelievable. And faith is Brother Juniper's livelihood, his raison d'être; he has negated his own faith and occupation, thereby rendering his own death sentence necessary.Diakoulakis asserts that there is an impossibility in The Bridge, a profound contradiction in attempting to determine if it was chance or a Creator's death sentence. In the “land of literature,” he asserts, “the only bridge is collapsing, by accident, necessarily, as we speak” (48). Literature has endless possibilities but is also infinitely determined and limited by its nature as literature. It is just as alive as it is dead—rife with the possibility of interpretation, meaning, and future “life,” yet dead in its impermeability and finiteness. It is not a never-ending story; it must have a beginning and an end. And, similarly, The Bridge investigates the tenuous nature of exploring chance versus fate or divine will. In doing so, one negates both. So, one must live with the “perhaps.”1 Perhaps it is fate, perhaps it is a death sentence, perhaps it is total chance. But according to Diakoulakis, “perhaps” is as good as we can get.Robinson's article is an investigation of close reading. The text in question is The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and he discusses the significance of rereading it later in life, decades after his first encounter with the work in his high school years in South Africa. Examining The Bridge, he portrays the advantages and disadvantages of close reading through practical, personal, and philosophical lenses. Robinson discusses various ways in which theories and the merits of close reading have evolved. One of his most salient points, which echoes British author Tim Parks, is that one of the main problems with close reading is that we are pushed “toward an elitist vision of literature in which aesthetic appreciation requires exhaustive knowledge … the dominance of the canon, the assumption of endless nuance and ambiguity, the need for close textual analysis” (103). Insistence on relying only on close reading to understand and investigate a text inevitably limits our ability towards a wider appreciation of literature as a whole; we need more width of knowledge rather than depth. Robinson intriguingly (and some might say, controversially) reminds us of the pitfalls of reiterating the “canon” in this way.Robinson begins and ends his essay with brief mentions of some of the limitations of understanding The Bridge of San Luis Rey only through close reading. Simply knowing how contemporary Wilder was would have shifted Robinson's perspective on the novel. Knowing some of the connections, criticisms, and ultimately homage paid to other authors' writing in Wilder's own would have expanded Robinson's reading and understanding of The Bridge and the later Wilder works he read. Robinson shows how revisiting a text like Bridge later in life changes as we create a different meaning through our own shifting contexts, our history, and our life experience. Continuously rereading, revisiting, and deepening our knowledge of texts without proper contextualization or understanding of its authorship limits our scope in ways that could be detrimental to education and pedagogy as a whole.Ertsgaard argues for the need of a myth of home similar to what is found in Our Town, even in the globalized reality we find ourselves in today. He argues that for many cultures, the idea of home has been unattainable because of the diasporic reality encountered through colonialization and global power structures. He sets up his discussion by laying out the need for a myth of home when talking about issues of sustainability. Sustainability is not a fight that needs to be won; rather, it is an appreciation and mythologizing of home that could lead to true change. Through the essay, he reveals how Our Town serves as an example of the “mythic power of home” he seeks.Ertsgaard's major use of Our Town is to set up a dialogue comparing a work that communicates a distinct power, poignancy, and beauty to the idea of home with works that emphasize a lack of ability to reside in one place due to factors outside of one's control. He effectively and appropriately recognizes that for many, a localized “home” is simply not possible. Much of his discussion also involves Alberto Fuguet's novel The Movies of My Life, which follows a character whose family is scattered across several continents. He juxtaposes Fuguet's novel with the localized nature of Our Town, arguing that they both culminate in a sense of what home truly is. Home, Ertsgaard argues, can be achieved even when one's reality is transient or global in nature. He uses Fuguet's and Wilder's books to show that a deep appreciation for home, no matter where you are, could mobilize our global community into long-lasting sustainable practices.Tappan Wilder provides a detailed and intriguing look at the little-known acting adaptation of A Doll's House that Thornton Wilder prepared for a 1937 production which was directed by Jed Harris and starred Ruth Gordon. He looks at the production and literary history of the adaptation, noting that Thornton Wilder was motivated to provide a new English-language acting adaptation because the translations he had seen were as “wooden as they can be” (114). This afterword serves as a necessary look into the history and context surrounding Wilder's adaptation, performed for the first time this century by Theatre for a New Audience and published for the first time by Theatre Communications Group.Vork uses various trauma theorists to connect Our Town—and specifically the final scene in which George visits Emily's grave—to the process of experiencing and witnessing trauma. He describes the ways in which the final scene enables a certain level of callousness and lack of compassion on the part of the play's audience; witnessing the trauma of the final act enables the audience to avoid entering into that trauma fully. Vork views mourning in Our Town as an impossible endeavor and provides significant insight into Emily's final moments and the importance of “looking” in those final scenes (349). He notes that what she is seeing and experiencing evades description and resides outside of the tangible, just like our existence and the world around us are too wonderful to be fully realized. There is an absence, a void where words fail; others cannot truly or fully enter into whatever trauma we might be experiencing on a personal level. Ultimately, Emily's “look” and the Stage Manager's detached relationship to those final traumatic moments serve not as an effective reminder of how to live each moment to the full, as is often assumed. On the contrary, they portray an inability to enter into the process of mourning and a detachment from trauma and those experiencing it. He says that the play is more of an “apology” (361) than a “life-affirming philosophy” (360). We cannot realize life in the moment, only after the fact. That, according to Vork, is the biggest tragedy of all.Gallagher-Ross provides sophisticated and fascinating insight into the ways Wilder's drama traverses boundaries and moves through seemingly impenetrable barriers. His plays promote a democratic mode of belonging in the way they navigate differences between prose and drama, time periods, performer, and audience. Wilder travels outside the boundaries put on his writing by misguided critics and theatergoers. Gallagher-Ross writes: All these instances in which the time and activity of the audience is joined to the time of the stage serve to remind Wilder's spectators that they are all witnesses to the same event, but are not necessarily seeing it in the same way. For Wilder, the shared experience of common difference is a truer picture of America, in all its vastness. And creating frames for the individual perceptions of his disparate spectators became the basis of his theatrical experimentation in the everyday plays. (44) Gallagher-Ross gives a detailed reading of what he calls Wilder's “everyday plays”—plays that focus on staging everyday events. He groups Pullman Car Hiawatha, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, The Long Christmas Dinner, and Our Town into this “matched set” of plays (38). He notes the ways in which Wilder provides and encourages a certain type of diversity, one where people from different cultures and backgrounds can see the same depiction of “everyday” events yet have a distinctly different experience in the viewing of them.He carefully notes the ways in which these plays transcend the traditional idea of Wilder's work as static in nature—Our Town, after all, focuses on the daily life of one small, particular New England town. Gallagher-Ross effectively challenges this view, focusing on how Wilder's characters are in constant motion, whether literally in Happy Journey, generationally in The Long Christmas Dinner, or cosmically in Our Town. This focus on motion in Wilder's plays takes the reader on a personal journey through ruminations on topics including Wilder's poetics, aesthetics, and ultimately the democracy found in the appreciation of the everyday.Niforatos and Rutecki take us through a reading of Wilder's three-minute The Angel that Troubled the Waters that sees the play as a “plea for physician healing.” They contend that the physician's request centers on a desire to be healed of some sort of depression or suicidal thoughts and suggest that this reflects the mindset of the day which viewed mental health not as a legitimate reason for concern or treatment, but rather as representative of a weakness within the individual doctor. If doctors were unable to overcome mental and emotional issues, they did not deserve to be in the profession. Niforatos and Rutecki conclude that today's world needs to continue to take steps towards combating that mindset, instead treating mental health as legitimate an illness as any physical ailment.English provides an intriguing look into the somewhat fraught 1960s adaptation of Wilder's The Ides of March. In 1961, Wilder gave Jerome Kilty the right to adapt his novel into a play, which was the first time such a project had been undertaken. She discusses how the play “failed to create the expressionist aspects of the original and to bring to life Wilder's most pressing concerns” (269). She also notes that it “sacrifices some of the poignancy and tenderness” of Wilder's novel and “gone is Wilder's hallmark commentary on human affairs and the continuum of emotions that links the ancient past with the modern reader” (270). Ultimately, according to English, Kilty's play fails to capture much of the life Wilder breathes into the novel for the sake of plot, narrative, and action. Characters are reduced to one-dimensional caricatures, and the play “leaves the audience yearning for the vibrancy of life, death, and love that characterizes Wilder's work” (273).This collection gathers twenty essays that testify to the “sheer gratification” Wilder felt in collaborating with other artists and authors (x). The contributors use the term collaboration in the “broadest sense,” acknowledging that, throughout his career, Wilder was criticized for “borrowing” from other authors. While some of the essays respond directly to this criticism, the collection more importantly points to the broad and diverse reach of Wilder's influences. The ways in which he intentionally—and at times, unintentionally—collaborated with other writings, authors, and artists are explored in this fascinating and expansive collection of essays.The book is divided into five sections that focus on specific types of collaboration. In the first section, “Wilder in Literary and Intellectual Collaboration,” Christopher J. Wheatley, Lincoln Konkle, Macy McDonald, Howard R. Wolf, and Samuel Perrin contribute essays that showcase the links between Wilder's writing and various theoretical approaches. Humanism, postmodernism, existentialism, and modernity are explored through The Matchmaker, Our Town, The Alcestiad, and The Skin of Our Teeth.In the second section, “Wilder in Collaboration with Dramatic Traditions,” David Radavich discusses Wilder's consistent and intentional references to literature and art outside of the world of his plays in order to allow his audience and readers to construct meaning; Susan C. W. Abbotson considers the shifting perceptions of The Skin of Our Teeth in the years following its premiere; Felicia Hardison Londré dissects how Wilder's knowledge of Sigmund Freud affected his writing of the script for Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt; and Robert Gurval discusses how Wilder's version of Julius Caesar, in his novel The Ides of March, affected Rex Harrison's performance of the same character in the 1963 film, Cleopatra.The third section, “Wilder in Collaboration with Fictional Traditions,” transitions from discussions of Wilder's collaborations with dramatic forms to connections and inspirations from sources such as Dante, Homer, and Vergil. Stephen Rojcewicz and Judith P. Hallett demonstrate how Our Town, Theophilus North, The Cabala, The Woman of Andros, among other works by Wilder, inform, affect, and converse with many forms of Greco-Roman classical fiction. Sarah Littlefield focuses on Wilder's connection to Newport, Rhode Island, and the effect it had on his final novel, Theophilus North.The collection's penultimate section, “Wilder in Collaboration with Contemporary Colleagues,” shows how Wilder and his work sit in conversation with other authors of his time. David Roessel and Tori Novack portray how a leftist theatrical group in the 1930s, through parody and sarcasm, ironically acknowledged the importance of a play like Our Town. Edyta Oczkowicz examines the eastern European premiere of Our Town in Poland and the effect it had on legendary Polish director Leon Schiller and generations of directors after him. Brian Rowe's essay investigates the sexuality—and its broader implications—of the character Uncle Charlie in Wilder's partnership with Alfred Hitchcock in writing and filming Shadow of a Doubt. Terryl W. Hallquist discusses the collaboration between Wilder and famed director Elia Kazan and the challenges they faced as they tried to stage the first production of The Skin of Our Teeth while Wilder was beginning his active duty involvement in World War II.In the book's final section, “Performing and Interpreting Wilder Collaboratively Today,” Hansong Dan considers the challenges theater practitioners faced when interpreting and adapting Our Town for Chinese audiences; Dianna Pickens recounts the discovery, translation into Italian, and premiere of a forgotten Wilder play for an Italian audience; and Laurie McCants and Gabriel Nathan contribute separate but similar essays that emphasize the enduring power of Wilder's plays, whether staging them with high school students, as McCants did with Pullman Car Hiawatha, or Our Town, as Nathan did with the staff of a psychiatric hospital.Bryer discusses the “dark side” of Thornton Wilder, paying special attention to Wilder's 1955 play The Alcestiad. He explores the myriad ways in which Wilder was influenced by classical tragedy. He acknowledges that Greek tragedy found its way into Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth; but he notes that the most obvious example of Wilder's reworking of tragedy lies in the little-known The Alcestiad.Bryer devotes most of his essay to this Wilder adaptation of Euripides's Alcestis. He shows how Wilder was willing to dive into the tragedy of human existence and the existential questions about religion and the divine that have always troubled humankind. Wilder was “far from simply an optimist” and he “saw life and its tragedies clearly in all their complexity and resisted simple explanations for them” (64). Bryer provides a fascinating account of Wilder's play and attests to how, contrary to much popular belief, Wilder was willing to explore tragedy through his writing, most directly in The Alcestiad.Roberts provides a poignant look at the way the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, influenced Thornton Wilder in his writing, specifically focusing on Our Town. She discusses the ways that Wilder advocates for a deep connection between art and civic life, saying: “Our Town remains powerful because local cultural actors can find within its confines a way to articulate and enact the relationship between art and community” (411). She points to multiple ways in which Wilder was connected to the MacDowell Colony and civic mediation; she intriguingly examines the influence of the community he found at the MacDowell Colony, his desire for community and collective participation, the simplicity of storytelling exhibited in the MacDowell yearly pageants, the potential for “cultural mobilization of different groups” (405) to break down racial barriers, the accessibility of producing the play, and the “living” nature of the play. Ultimately, Roberts effectively proves how “Wilder wrote a play that would give other towns the chance to make art and community coincide” (410); but she also appropriately shows, through characters like Simon Stimson, how Our Town portrays that art and civic life do not always coexist in harmony.Roberts ends her essay with a powerful example of how a production of Our Town in Anchorage, Alaska, following a traumatic earthquake of 1964, “became a sign of community resilience when it resumed production to a sold-out crowd, just days after the ground stopped shaking” (412). Roberts provides ample evidence of the power of Wilder's play to encourage community—and diversity, as she notes the adaptability of Our Town to places all over the world and neighborhoods such as Compton, California2—and the long-lasting nature of human resiliency in the face of tribulation.Zacharasiewicz takes us through a survey of the deep appreciation Wilder had for European culture, art, literature, and theater and the multitudinous ways in which it affected and influenced his own work. He emphasizes in the last part of his essay the special relationship that Wilder had with Vienna before the Nazi occupation and his deep admiration for Austrian writers and the influence they had on his writing, specifically The Merchant of Yonkers (which later became The Matchmaker and, ultimately and famously, the inspiration for Hello, Dolly!). His piece serves as a wonderful insight into the numerous ways in which Wilder immersed himself in European cultural traditions, but also makes important mention of other global influences that affected Wilder and his work. He concludes: All in all, although Wilder kept with the heritage of his own country, his encounters with European, including Austrian intellectuals, writers, people in the theaters and artistic creations were realized in the broader context of his cosmopolitan life-style and varied experiences. They thus contributed not insignificantly to his orientation towards an idea of universal humanity, which he mediated in his various literary and theatrical texts. (157)Storckman provides a brief look into the female characters in some of Wilder's best-known works. She marvels at how “staggering, how three-dimensional, specific, and powerful characters” they are. She discusses Emily in Our Town, Ma Kirby in The Happy Journey, Sabina and Mrs. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth, and Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker. Although her analyses are brief, Storckman provides good evidence of the significance, influence, and agency Wilder gives these women, noting that “Ultimately, he had an appreciation for the work of women and the way they bear witness to the world.” Storckman ends with what arguably is the best example of Wilder's deep appreciation and amplification of women's voices when she quotes Mrs. Antrobus's monologue which includes this well-known sentence: “We're not what you're all told and what you think we are: We're ourselves. And if any man can find one of us, he'll learn why the whole universe was set in motion.”Marranca provides a short glimpse into her experience viewing the painting of the same name by Amy Bennett in her “Nuclear Family” exhibit. Her commentary muses on the way in which the painting differs slightly from the play, but nonetheless provides a resonant accounting of how the particular nature of Wilder's play seamlessly mixes in with the global and eternal. Marranca notes that the most striking addition to this painting which depicts the play being performed is the presence of armed guards. It is a profound reminder of the world in which we live: one where mass gatherings are constantly threatened by the violence to which we have become so accustomed. Marranca's piece is a powerful reminder of the endurance of Wilder's play and the contemporary significance of its message.This book serves as a context for the Zacharasiewicz chapter mentioned earlier. Here he examines the varied ideas people had about Vienna and Austria in the early part of the twentieth century. While he specifically unpacks Wilder's literary and artistic associations with the area in the chapter already mentioned, here he provides some more biographical information as to when and where Wilder traveled during his time in the region.This biography makes several mentions of Stein's friendship with Wilder and the influence they had on one another's work. Wilder and Stein had a well-known and oft-cited friendship, and Morris provides many examples of their interactions and the ways in which their friendship continued to develop and influence one another.This brief article discusses the production of all seven of Wilder's one-act plays in a cycle entitled The Seven Deadly Sins, the first time that all seven have been produced in their entirety as a series. They were staged on 21–24 November 2019, by students at Suffolk University in Boston, directed by faculty member Wesley Savick. These one acts serve as what Savick calls a “reminder of morality as a force worthy of our attention.”Fifteen books by Amos Wilder have found much needed new life in the recently published “Amos Wilder Library” through Wipf and Stock Publishers. Wilder's influential older brother now has a new home for these works, which range from collections of his poetry (Arachne) to theology (Jesus' Parables and the War of Myths) to his written contributions about his brother (Thornton Wilder and His Public).