Thornton Wilder was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, a Midwestern city whose plain-spoken civic life would find its way, in transmuted form, into some of the most performed plays in the American theater. A citizen of the United States, Wilder moved through an unusually broad education, attending Chefoo School, Berkeley High School, The Thacher School, Oberlin College, Yale University, and Princeton University before establishing himself as a writer working in English across several forms — playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and librettist among them.

His career produced work recognized at the highest levels of American letters. The novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey earned him a Pulitzer Prize, as did the play Our Town and, later, the play The Skin of Our Teeth — three Pulitzer Prizes in total, spanning both fiction and drama. His novel The Eighth Day brought him a U.S. National Book Award, marking his continued productivity well into the later decades of his life.

Recognition extended beyond the United States. Wilder received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Peace Prize of the German Publishers' and Booksellers' Association, the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, and the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt. The accumulation of these honors across two continents reflects the reach of his writing in both the English-speaking world and the German-speaking countries that held his work in particular esteem.

The question of where exactly Wilder died carries a small ambiguity — sources place his death in the vicinity of New Haven, in Hamden, Connecticut — but the date is certain: December 7, 1975. He had spent his final years still connected to the New England region where Yale had once shaped his early formation, and it was there, not far from that university city, that his life ended.