The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 16

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THORNTON WILDER

The Art of Fiction No. 16

Interviewed by Richard H. Goldstone

Issue 15, Winter 1956

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INTERVIEWER Is it your contention that there is no place in the theater for didactic intentions?

WILDER The theater is so vast and fascinating a realm that there is room in it for preachers and moralists and pamphleteers. As to the highest function of the theater, I rest my case with Shakespeare—Twelfth Night as well as Macbeth.

* * *

INTERVIEWER I wonder if you don't hammer your point pretty hard because actually you have a considerable element of the didactic in you.

WILDER Yes, of course. I've spent a large part of my life trying to sit on it, to keep it down. The pages and pages I've had to tear up! I think the struggle with it may have brought a certain kind of objectivity into my work.

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	Authors Mentioned
	T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Robert Browning, John Bunyan, Willa Cather, Jean de la Fontaine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, James Joyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Sophocles, Marquise de Sévigné, Lope de Vega, Voltaire, W. B. Yeats

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