WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The Library of America's new volume on Thornton Wilder includes his early run of novels from "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" in 1927, to "The Ides of March" in 1948.
As with his classic plays "Our Town" and "The Skin of Our Teeth," which have retained their hold on posterity in a way that his novels have not, Wilder primarily was a man of ideas who pursued those ideas in dramatic forms.
Of the books in the volume, I'm partial to "The Ides of March," an epistolary novel about Julius Caesar, which assuredly gave Gore Vidal the inspiration for his own novel "Julian."
"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" is a beautifully conceived book about a priest's inquiry into a collapsed Peruvian bridge, and what brought the various people who died there to be on that bridge at that particular moment. It's heavier on philosophy than drama, but no less beautiful.
Also included are the lovely picaresque "Heaven's My Destination," "The Cabala," "The Woman of Andros," and a group of stories and literary essays, the most notable of which are two pieces about Joyce.
I've always found "Finnegan's Wake" an indigestible dog's dinner, but Wilder's characteristically erudite but impassioned analysis of Joyce's later work is as compelling a defense as anything I've ever read.
In the Pipeline...
Princeton University Press is starting up a series called "Writers on Writers." The first volumes will include Alexander McCall Smith on Auden, Philip Lopate on Sontag, and C.K. Williams on Whitman.
Mike Browning's Word of the Week...
halieutics: a treatise on fish or fishing.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.