TCNJ News
For Immediate Release
August 19, 2008
English Department receives grant to sponsor first-ever
international Thornton Wilder conference
EWING, NJ … The College of New Jersey is pleased to announce that the English Department has received a $10,000 grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in support of “Wilder in the Twenty-first Century,” the first international conference on Thornton Wilder, sponsored by TCNJ and the Thornton Wilder Society. Earlier, the department received a $1,000 grant from the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission through funding from the Mercer County Board of Chosen Freeholders, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment of the Arts.
The program will be a three-day event, from Thursday, October 2 through Saturday, October 4, 2008. Programs include Teaching Wilder Seminars for New Jersey teachers (Thursday and Friday, 10/2 and 10/3); a plenary session with top scholars Christopher Bigsby, Scott Donaldson, and Tappan Wilder (Thursday 10/3); a playwrights’ panel with Edward Albee, Lee Blessing, Tina Howe, and Donald Margulies; a reading by Tony and Obie Award-winning actress Marian Seldes and Edward Albee; and a directors’ panel with Carl Forsman, Irene Lewis, and Emily Mann (all on Friday 10/3); a banquet where the first Thornton Wilder Prize will be presented to distinguished novelist Russell Banks (Saturday 10/4); a campus production of Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth by local repertory company Shakespeare ’70 (all three days at 8 p.m.); and papers presented (all three days, registration required) on topics related to Wilder’s plays, novels, and other works by scholars from all over the U.S. and abroad (England, France, Italy, Croatia, Egypt, China, and Japan).
For more information about the Wilder Society or the conference, please visit www.thorntonwildersociety.org
Thornton Wilder was a celebrated twentieth-century American writer. His full-length plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, both won Pulitzer Prizes, as did his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey; no other writer has won Pulitzers in both fiction and drama. His farce The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly! and his penultimate novel The Eighth Day won the National Book Award. He also wrote the first draft of the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt.
In 2005 The College of New Jersey became the headquarters of the Thornton Wilder Society. Wilder had a strong connection to New Jersey from having taught French at the Lawrenceville School from 1921 to 1928, with a break from 1925 to 1927 to earn a master’s degree in French literature from Princeton University. No other state serves as the setting for part or all of a Wilder play, novel, or film as often as New Jersey. The Skin of Our Teeth is set in Atlantic City and fictional suburb Excelsior, New Jersey. In his 1931 one-act play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, Wilder has a character say, “I’m glad I was born in New Jersey. I always said it was the best state in the union.”
About The College of New Jersey
TCNJ currently is ranked as one of the 75 "Most Competitive" schools in the nation by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, is rated the No. 1 public institution in the northern region of the country by U.S. News & World Report, and is one of Kiplinger's Personal Finance's top educational values in the country. In 2006, the College joined an elite group of institutions when it was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation's colleges and universities share this honor.
