Thornton Wilder, one of the last in the line of the New England puritan writers, was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on 17 April 1897. Second son of Amos Parker Wilder, a native of Maine and a descendant of New Englanders who had their roots in seventeenth-century England, Wilder made his home in the environs of New Haven, Connecticut, from late adolescence until his death. His mother was Isabella Thornton Niven, raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister originally from Virginia.

Wilder's father, Amos, who earned both his B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale in political science, was a newspaper editor. In 1894 he acquired the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison. After quarreling with the more liberal Sen. Robert La Follette, the elder Wilder secured the post of consul general in Hong Kong, so that Thornton, aged nine, uprooted from his Wisconsin birthplace, found himself with...