In 1906, he sought a position in the consular service, and with the support of Yale friends within the Republican party, he received an appointment as U.S. consul general in Hong Kong. After twelve years of residence in Madison, the Wilder family sailed for Hong Kong from San Francisco only days before the earthquake there. They arrived in Hong Kong on May 7, 1906, shortly after Thornton’s ninth birthday. Life in Hong Kong offered a complete change from the neighborliness of Madison and the activities associated with its homes, shops, and public schools.
Just five months after their arrival in China, the new consul general and his wife decided that Hong Kong was not a good place to rear and educate their children. On October 30, 1906, Isabella Niven Wilder and the four children left Hong Kong, returned to San Francisco, and settled in Berkeley, California, another university town, where the children were enrolled in the local public schools. Their father sent money to support them, supervised their upbringing long-distance through detailed instructions in letters, and saw them on home leaves. Their mother supervised their daily lives and kept Papa informed of their progress; his children wrote to him regularly about their activities and thoughts.
In early spring 1909, Consul General Wilder was promoted and transferred from Hong Kong to Shanghai. Before taking up his new post on June 1, 1909, he paid a short visit to his family in Berkeley. In the fall, he made another trip from Shanghai to California, with a plan for reuniting his family in Shanghai, because he believed it would be a better situation for them than Hong Kong had been. The family reunion did not take place until more than a year later, for Janet Frances, the fifth and final Wilder sibling, was born on June 3, 1910.
In December 1910, Mrs. Wilder embarked on the S.S. Mongolia for Shanghai with her four youngest children. The eldest child, fifteen year-old Amos, was sent to the Thacher School, a boarding school in Ojai, California, established in 1889 by a Yale acquaintance of the senior Wilder. This was one of the country’s first “ranch schools,” where each boy had a horse to care for, took camping trips, and learned wilderness skills, along with partaking in the usual sports and college-preparatory course work.
Mrs. Wilder was physically unwell in Shanghai and distressed by the unsettled political situation in China. Her doctor suggested a change in climate, and in mid-August 1911, she sailed for Europe through the Suez Canal with her two youngest daughters, Isabel, now eleven, and Janet, just over a year old. They landed in Genoa and proceeded to Florence, Italy, where they joined Mrs. Wilder’s younger sister, Charlotte Tappan Niven, and their widowed mother, Elizabeth Lewis Niven. Mrs. Wilder’s sister was running a hostel for the international arm of the Young Women’s Christian Association.
After some time at a German school in Shanghai, Thornton and Charlotte were sent to the China Inland Mission Schools in Chefoo, approximately 450 miles from Shanghai. They enrolled in the spring term of 1911 and remained there until August 1912. Charlotte attended the Girls’ School and Thornton the Boys’; they were permitted to visit with each other for an hour each week. Wilder’s friends at Chefoo included Theodore Wilder (no relation) and Henry Luce.
Amos Parker Wilder took home leave after his wife sailed for Europe. He visited his elder son at Thacher, conducted business, and saw friends in Madison. He consulted with doctors, because he had developed Asian sprue, a digestive disease that had left him in a weakened state. While still in the United States, he made arrangements for Thornton and Charlotte to leave Chefoo before the fall term and to take passage on the S.S. Nile for San Francisco. They arrived in San Francisco in early September 1912. While Charlotte boarded with family friends in Claremont, California, and attended the local public school there, Thornton joined his brother, Amos, at the Thacher School. During Christmas vacation, Thornton and Amos visited Charlotte and stayed with her and the family with whom she boarded. For the three older Wilder children, the important news was that their mother and two youngest sisters, whom they had not seen in over a year, were planning to return to Berkeley in the spring of 1913. A few months later, the family was reunited, although again without their father.
Amos graduated from Thacher in June 1913 and was sent to work in an orchard in northern California before leaving in the fall for Oberlin College. Thornton attended an arts program at the local public school in Berkeley and helped his mother get settled. He did not return to Thacher. He and Charlotte (although she was a year younger than Thornton) began their junior year together at Berkeley High School, while thirteen-year-old Isabel attended the local McKinley Elementary School, and three-year-old Janet remained at home with her mother.
In the spring of 1914, Amos Parker Wilder, whose Asian sprue disease had worsened in the Shanghai climate, resigned from the consular service and returned to Berkeley, where it was decided that Isabella would stay until Thornton and Charlotte had graduated from high school in June 1915. Charlotte’s father took her on a trip to Yosemite Park, but the trip was cut short when he became so ill that it became necessary for him to travel to New York City earlier than anticipated to receive medical care. He remained in the East, returning to his old college town of New Haven, where he accepted the position of secretary and treasurer of the Yale-in-China program and prepared for the arrival of his family after Charlotte’s and Thornton’s high school graduations.
Although separated from his children in California, the elder Wilder carefully planned their summer activities. He believed that his sons should use their school vacations to exert themselves physically in healthy outdoor labor, to expand their experience to include practical, homely tasks, and to associate with people in a setting that contrasted with the more familiar urbanity of Berkeley. Between his junior and senior years in high school, Thornton was sent to work on a farm in San Luis Obispo. After his graduation from high school in 1915, Thornton came east and learned from his father that he was to work on a farm in Vermont before following his brother to Oberlin. The Wilder brothers, however, did not overlap at Oberlin; Amos, under his father’s guidance, had transferred to Yale College for his last two years.
Oberlin College was founded in 1833 by members of the Congregational denomination, which played a significant role in the abolitionist movement. It was the first college in the nineteenth century to have a racially integrated and coed student body. Oberlin also had a music conservatory attached to it. The Oberlin College that Thornton Wilder attended for two years, beginning in 1915, represented the continuing tradition of evangelical Congregationalism, which combined a concern for social causes, personal religion, and missionary work; in a more secular but related mode, the college emphasized teaching and public service. It was a high-minded, serious institution, and while supporting athletic teams and literary and drama clubs, it was much given to religious pursuits such as class prayer meetings.
At Oberlin, Thornton continued to develop his musical interests—he sang in choral groups and took instruction in violin, piano, and organ—which was traceable to and encouraged throughout his boyhood. He also published fiction and plays in the college literary magazine. His Oberlin experiences helped him to shed some of his social awkwardness among contemporaries, an endeavor encouraged, perhaps, by this public acknowledgment of his literary talent. At Oberlin, he renewed his Chefoo friendship with Theodore Wilder and forged close new relationships with undergraduates Robert M. Hutchins, Ruth Keller, and Nina Trego, and with Professor Charles H. A. Wager, the chairman of the English Department. During the summers after Thornton’s freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin, his father continued to arrange for him to work on farms attached to institutions the senior Wilder admired: the Mount Hermon School farm in Massachusetts in 1916, and the farm at Berea College (often referred to as the “Oberlin of Kentucky” because it had been founded on the same ideals as its sister school in Ohio) in 1917.
In the fall of 1917, at his father’s behest, Thornton Wilder entered Yale College. He had to repeat his sophomore year, possibly because some of his Oberlin credits were not transferable. The family was hou
sed in nearby Mount Carmel, approximately eight miles by trolley from the center of New Haven. Now they were living together, or at least near one another, with the exception of the eldest child, Amos. He was driving an ambulance in Paris, then later on the western front and in Macedonia, before he joined the American Field Artillery after the United States entered World War I. Charlotte, a junior at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, was not far away, and Thornton lived on the Yale campus in downtown New Haven. With the exception of a job in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1918, and a little more than three months’ military service in the Coast Artillery on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, Thornton spent the next three years at Yale, in proximity to his family. In fact, after his brother’s discharge from the army, the two roomed together at Yale before both graduated in 1920.
As at Oberlin, Thornton Wilder’s literary output at Yale was prodigious and his talent noted and appreciated. His pieces were published in the Yale Literary Magazine almost upon his arrival on campus. At Yale, however, he gained recognition in a literary milieu that tested his worth against other gifted writers and expanded his acquaintance with others interested and influential in the arts. During those three years, he was elected to esteemed Yale literary societies, among them the Elizabethan (“Lizzie”) Club; Chi Delta Theta, a senior literary society; and the Pundits, a group of undergraduates known for their wit and high spirits. He was elected secretary of the Pundits, and he also won writing prizes for two genres: short story and drama. At Yale, he reunited with Henry Luce and Robert M. Hutchins; began lifelong close friendships with musician Bruce T. Simonds and librarian Gilbert Troxell; and met poet Stephen Vincent Benét, playwright Philip Barry, and publisher John Farrar. He found mentors in Yale English professors Chauncey B. Tinker and William Lyon Phelps. In June 1920, as Thornton Wilder completed his undergraduate education, he knew he wanted to be a writer, but he had very little notion of how he could afford to become one.
1. TO ELIZABETH LEWIS NIVEN.1 ALS 4 pp. Yale
April 24.
Dear Grandma,
I had no trouble in cashing the check, for which I thank you very much. My income is not large and I am always thankful for a gift.
I am to join the church very soon. Also Amos.2
Mr. Miles our new minister has had preparatory class for several weeks. He is a Yale man a friend of Mr. Parsons and Father.
I would very happy if—I could live in Europe but Mother is not at all sure we can go.
You know I am in the Episcopal choir. Tomorrow the Bishop comes and is to give two gold pins, one for deportment and one for attendence. I am to recieve the one for good deportment.
We feel glad that uncle Thornton3 likes to go to Washington.
We had a Bach Festival Thursday in which the Mass in B miner was given with great succes.
The Chicago Symphony orchestra is coming. The Ben Greet players4 are also to be here in the Greek Theatre, where the Mass was held,5
your loving grandson
Thornton Niven Wilder
Wilder family in Berkeley, 1910. Left to right: Isabel, TNW, Isabella, Janet (in her lap), Amos N., and Charlotte.
Wilder family in Berkeley, 1910. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
2. TO AMOS P. WILDER.6ALS 2 pp. Yale
Dear Papa,
Tonight I am going to Rev. Browns Church to hear Handel’s great Oratorio “The Messiah,” sung. Do they ever have anything like that in China?
Our Piano has been taken away now, and the sitting rooms little cold without it.
We are going to Miss. O’Connor’s for tea this afternoon.
Janet Frances Wilder7 now weighs 12 ½ lbs at 6 months.
Yesterday afternoon I left the letter unfinished, as we left for the O’connors. I came home early and started for “The Messiah” first I went & met Margeret Miles, who invited me, and then we went way over to North Berkeley and got her friend a Mrs. Nipper (I think). She was once a missionary in Turkey. She is very, very sweet. When we got to Dr. Brown’s Church it was 7.15. We went in and found that it was not the “Messiah” this year, but Saint-Sean’s Christmas Oratoria “Noel”.8 I was not at all disappointed as Margeret expected. The music was beatifully discriptive; angel and shepard Chorus and recitatives of the first Xmas.
Lovingly
Thornton Wilder
3. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., AND ISABEL WILDER.9 ALS 4 pp. Yale
Dear Family,
This is a letter we write instead of a composition, I suppose. It is a specimen of grammar, spelling and writing and it passes through other hands than your own.
I have been (relabled) relabeled and rechristened. No. 10 cell 19; Commonly known as Wilder Minor, because of a Major a roommate of mine.10 He is about my age and about my size; I know a few others too. I am put in a class much higher than I ever expected and there is some doubt of how long I will stay. Im allready tackling the six major declentions in a Latin grammar and the rudiments of Algebra.
The Officials in the streets here wear the sensational looking Cholera noseguard.11
The journey up wasn’t so very calm, and I was seasick once, but it wasn’t at all bad. There was a Baron on board with a son and daughter. The son read a french edition of “Anna Karénina”12 and the daughter slept. On board there was also a french officer who could not talk any english; But he stuck on me thinking I was a french scholar somehow and talked french to me for quite a while. I went away as soon as an excuse came up and played with two black cats. Later for the dare of it I returned and asked him (I dont know how to spell it right)
“Parlez vous Allegmanne, Monsier?”13
The man admiring the suberb accent and unapproachable grammar pour out his soul in french to me with much gesticulation. I went away.
The boys here talk a kind of slang of there own which is very funny at first. They spoke a while ago of a ship going “horribly” slow, and of one another being “abject” clowns. The boys on the ship gave me the scare but I’m over it now; the thing of it is “that they always are calling one another silly idiots” and “abject fools” and any other thing of the sort. Last night as I was lieing in bed I heard from all the other rooms the goodnights and parting thrusts. They were very funny. I wish I could have taken them down. Most of the boys have nicknames; “Ape”, “Parsee”, derived from Percy, “Spadger, “Iago”, “Pollywog” and many others.
We just had singing a few minutes ago. The boys all learn by the Sol-Fa System and the music-books looks like Hiroglyphics (tell it to the cook, mater).
You can send this to Amos?
Lovingly
Thornton Wilder.
4. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Dear Papa,
I have just received your letters. I see you saw that I could not find your picture. I did not know how you would take it, I see you have or else some one else has, and as for mama’s idea of my looking for it, that is impossible, the trunks being kept in inner sanctuaries, and I would not ask the matrons to let me go and search after it after they vowed it wasn’t there. And about Mother’s picture it has been blown around the room by the Chefoo monsoons (Janet’s too) untill the “fall of the house of Wilder” is complete. Now a roomate has lent me a frame of his and she swings on the wall.
For Mothers and Auntie’s14 benefit (From the latin bene—good) (ahem!)
I will recount our meal today.
music teacher Helper Mr. McCarthy Chief Housekeeper Mr. Murry, Lea or Mr. Alty Wardrobe mist
ress Females all helpers! A whole army each with a nickname.
At the end of the tables sit the teachers who deal out the soup and meat. The plate with the meat on is passed to the centre of the table where the prefects sit. The prefects pour on vegetables and gravy. (If the decks-out are mad at you they either pour on Mts. of food or just a little.) Today we had soop
Entrée a crust to be eaten with (soup)
Vegetable soop (commonly known as Dishwater.)
Meat (lamb) Rice, potatoes and greens (weeds).
Dessert Yellow Tapioca in flowing liquidity
This last is call tuck-shop pudding because it is given on candy-shop days. I do not buy candy any more, but buy photos of the cricket teams etc that have the portraits of my friends in. I have begun violin with (Mr) Murray commonly known as Shinter).
I am learning a few trios to play with him-self (he play cello also) and the piano-teacher. I am also in a dozen, stands for the glee-club—I suppose. Tonight again is bath night. I suppos you saw in my next to the last letters that I found that which I thought was lost. I’m glad I found it.
My german has also begun, we have a sharp, irratable lady-teacher who gives us (that Walter Hearn and I are the only German pupils) awfull hard prep. (from the word preparation meaning Home-work). I went to the beach today after Sweet-cupboard and found a cats-eye. Wilder I found nine! He has much better eyes that