Wilder's most famous work of fiction is The Bridge of San Luis Rey, his 1927 best-selling novel about the collapse of a bridge in Peru. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. It is available in a 1998 edition from Harper Perennial.

Wilder's most popular play is Our Town, a heartwarming view of small-town American life. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938, the year it was produced. It is available along with The Matchmaker and The Skin of Our Teeth in Three Plays, published in paperback by Harper Perennial in 1998.

Bernard Malamud's 1954 short story "The Magic Barrel" is one of the most famous literary works about matchmaking. Drawing on New York Yiddish culture, Malamud weaves a tale about a mysterious stranger who promises to find a wife for a busy rabbi. It is available in Malamud's The Complete Stories, published by Farrar, Straus & Gireaux in 1997.

Gertrude Stein was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and a close friend of Wilder.

The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, published by Yale University Press in 1996, helps readers get to know both authors through the correspondence they had over the course of twenty years.

The spirit of the farce in The Matchmaker is indebted to the seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière. In fact, Wilder uses two passages that he adapted directly from Molière's L'Avare, which translates into English as The Miser. Two versions if it are available in  Molière: Four Plays, published in 1999 by Branden Publishing Co.

A series of interviews with Wilder concerning his views of the world and theories about writing was collected by University of Mississippi Press in the 1992 book Conversations with Thornton Wilder, edited by Jackson R. Bryer.