Thornton Wilder

Wilder grew up shuttling between Wisconsin, California, and China, where his father served as a diplomat, then taught at a New Jersey boarding school before two world wars interrupted his career; he served as an army intelligence officer in the second, decorated for his service.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, his second novel, made him rich and famous at thirty and won the first of his three Pulitzers; the other two came for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, an unmatched sweep across genres, powered by a comparative-religion scholar's reach for the metaphysical inside small American and Peruvian lives alike.

A close friend of Gertrude Stein's, he defended her most difficult writing when few others would. He never married and died in his sleep in Connecticut in 1975.