Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1897. He taught French at the Lawrenceville School from 1921 and taught at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1937. During World War II he served in U.S. Army Air Forces Intelligence and rose to lieutenant colonel.
His works include The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), Our Town (1938), The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), The Matchmaker (1954) and Theophilus North (1973). He won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1968, and he died in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1975.