Professor Wilder in Chicago: 1930-1941
A comic relief campus map of The University of Chicago created by Elizabeth Moore (“Betty”) Fisher in 1932, the official cartoonist of “A Century of Progress” the exposition created to celebrate the centennial of the city of Chicago in 1933.
In 1929, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the newly minted president of the University of Chicago, offered his longtime friend Thornton Wilder the opportunity to teach annually on a part-time basis. Despite Wilder’s international acclaim as a novelist (The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) had earned more than a million dollars by today’s standards in its first year) and a long list of ideas for new novels and plays, Wilder jumped at the chance. The result was national news: Thornton Wilder would teach a seminar on creative writing and offer a lecture course in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago starting the fall quarter of 1930.
Why did he do it? Part of the reason was need. Construction of the family home in Hamden, Connecticut financed with a great deal of “Bridge” money, had just been completed and was now the domicile of his dependent parents and younger sister. As he wrote at the time to his close friend the actress Ruth Gordon: “I need the money for the running of Deepwood Drive.” With his own expenses and the upkeep of the house, he wasn’t willing to compromise his art or, as he described to Gordon, did not want to introduce a “necessity-money aspect to my writing” to pay bills.
What would soon be called The Great Depression also figured in his decision to teach. A job with a dependable paycheck (he would earn $4,001.00 for teaching in 1930) is never to be sneezed at in hard times. But the most important reason was that he loved to teach and thrived in vibrant residential academic environments like the University of Chicago with lively students and faculty and a great library. In fact, from the ‘30s when he taught part-time to almost the end of his life when he no longer taught, Wilder routinely described himself as a teacher who wrote rather than the other (more accurate) way around. However one balances the equation, what is clear is that he needed a part-time teaching life in order to function as a highly successful working writer and artist the remainder of the year.
Wilder’s notes for his second lecture on the “difficulties of attending our study of tragedy: translation: grand style: Aeschylus’s style” during his first year teaching at The University of Chicago in 1930.
Wilder fit in quickly in 1930. “Love my classes… and they’re sprouting that affectionate contempt for me which is the attitude I ask of my classes,” he wrote to his mother soon after he started. He refers here to the first lecture course he offered at the University of Chicago entitled “Tradition and Innovation – Aeschylus to Cervantes.” “Yes. Iliad and The Birds and Dante and Don Quixote and everything. And I cant even spell,” he explained in a letter to his friend Lady Sibyl Colefax in London. "40 lectures with the students writing a 6-minute paper every morning to prove they read the long assignment for homework. It’s absurd, but its very American and is exactly what I want.”
Wilder’s student never forgot him. "His classes were jam-packed, standing room only, with people on waiting lists: ‘Professor Wilder' was a star,” wrote Penelope Niven in Wilder: A Life. More than 65 years later, a former pupil recalled in detail Wilder, the born actor, performing on the academic stage: “I remember him vividly, especially how he used to come in the door of the lecture hall, talking a blue streak as he grabbed a pole, opened a window and finally made the podium, never missing a beat. We couldn’t write fast enough. He was so comical, and never knew he was. I remember his acting out all the roles of Dante’s Inferno (the subject of the month), and convulsing [?] his adoring students.” We also know from another former student, who rushed the story into print, that he once appeared in class in coat, shirt and tie but still, inadvertently, wearing his pajamas bottoms.
Wilder at a 1935 party celebrating Gertrude Stein, at the home of Barney and Bobsy Goodspeed. Left to right: University of Chicago President Charles Hutchins, opera singer Claire Dux Swift, Thornton Wilder, and writer and artist Maude Hutchins. Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago, Newberry Modern Manuscripts: Fanny Butcher Papers.
Wilder loved the University of Chicago and the City of Chicago. A collector of friendships, he charmed Chicago hostesses and developed a vibrant social circle mingling with the intellectual and social elite, settlement house workers (he sought out Jane Addams) and night club and criminal elements (he met The Golf Bag Killer). His name appeared routinely in the press for all sorts of reason. He wrote this note to his sister Isabel in 1933: “The columnists in town are linking my name with a certain xxxxxx xxxx [sic]; think nothing of it.”
He relished his role as a University-wide celebrity, writing in 1935: “tho’ if I do say it, I get better and better as a “campus character” in general circulation, accessible to all comers. Some mornings I rise up and swear that I shall never teach again, that I must go away and become a writer, etc. Other days I rise up and love it, the everything, the classes, the tumult on the stairs of Cobb Hall.”
Gertrude Stein visited Wilder in Chicago in March 1935. A former student described a favorite Wilder moment: “he brought Gertrude Stein to the campus, and another unforgettable memory was that of TW and Stein jogging down the Midway!”
As noted, the part-time academic life for Wilder provided the fuel he needed –both practical and inspirational—to operate at several varieties of writing and speaking for the rest of the year. And he remained a regular part-time member of the Chicago faculty through 1936, with a final cameo appearance in the summer quarter of 1941. The quarters away from the classroom he was lecturing throughout the country (under a multi-year speaker’s bureau contract), working in Hollywood for more than a few bucks, translating plays, and devoting himself, here and abroad, to his own fiction and drama. Wilder was never still and never took a vacation.
In 1955 at the age of 58, he looked back on his lifestyle with amused pleasure: “What poets we admire have earned their living by their pen? Marianne Moore, a librarian; William Carlos Williams, a Pediatrician; Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive. Dozens of us have been teachers. It’s too bad. It’s probably hurt us, but it’s only killed a few of us. But the one thing we didn’t do was to write rubbish in order to earn the money to write literature.”