1897–1975 · American novelist and playwright · three Pulitzer Prizes
Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) is the rare American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and drama — for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and later for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. The Woman of Andros, his third novel, set an ancient Greek island against a pre-Christian moral world and became the third best-selling book in the United States in 1930. It also drew the first serious critical backlash of his career, when the Marxist critic Michael Gold attacked him for writing about antiquity while Americans went unemployed.