Researching Thornton Wilder and ‘Our Town’
GOOD PLACES TO START
In our catalog (from our main library page, click the "Catalog" link in the left-hand column) ...
... An author search under "Wilder, Thornton" gives you two books:
Results of an author search under "Wilder, Thornton" in the MPA library catalog
... Several biographical dictionaries in the MPA library's collection have entries on Wilder; browse our shelves in the "REF 920" section. Two that have longer entries on him, with bibliographic references to the sources used to write them, are Memorable Americans 1750–1950 (REF 920 Dow) and The Encyclopedia of World Biography (REF 920 Enc, vol. 10). A librarian can show you how to find sources from other libraries mentioned in bibliographies like these.
... A subject search under the heading "Wilder, Thornton -- 1897-1975" gives you WebPath links to nine librarian-approved Web sites about the author and playwright, including one to New Hampshire Public Television about the MacDowell Colony, a writing community of which Wilder was a member, and another to the Library of Congress's "Today in History" site.
Results of a subject search under "Wilder, Thornton" in the MPA library catalog
... Our new online encyclopedia, the Grolier Encyclopedia Americana (accessed from the "Encyclopedias" link on our library page) has a page-long biography of Thornton Wilder. Search under his name to find it.
GOING DEEPER
Using "thornton wilder" as a search term (with or without quotation marks), try searching the library's databases (accessed from the "Databases" link on our library page).
You'll find 25 articles on Wilder in the Discovering Collection, including an 11-page biography, "Wilder, Thornton (Niven) (1897-1975)," that includes a complete annotated list of his novels and plays. (As with any useful article you find in a database, be sure to check the end of the article for a bibliography, notes, or "further reading." Those are other sources you can track down for your project; ask a librarian how you can get them to read for yourself.)
Although Wilder is an historical figure, his plays are widely produced today. Newspaper reviews of current productions often provide insights into the plays. Searching under "wilder, thornton" in the ProQuest Newspapers database will give you a list of "suggested topics" you can click on, including not just Wilder himself but characters in his plays—like Emily Webb (43 documents available) and George Gibbs (36 documents). There's also a separate category for reviews of his plays (19 documents).
The databases Academic Search Premier and MasterFile Premier are both published by EBSCO, so you'll find some overlap in the articles they retrieve. Look in the left-hand column of Academic Search Premier after you search on "thornton wilder" to find subject headings, like "Books—Reviews," that you can click on for a more-targeted search.
GOING WIDER (AND WILDER!)
Look in the Reference Links section of our library Web site for sites from which you can do specialized searches on the open Web—there's even a site called "Research Beyond Google." Putting "thornton wilder" in quotes in the search boxes will yield you the best results. For example, in Infomine, a collection of scholarly research sources, you'll find four articles in which he's mentioned, including Time Magazine's 2005 list of the "All-Time 100 Novels."