"An Eternal Family narrowly escape one disaster after another, from ancient times to the present. Meet George and Maggie Antrobus (married only 5,000 years); their two children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in every way!); and their maid, Sabina (the ageless vamp) as they overcome ice, flood, and war -- by the skin of their teeth."--Amazon

Three of the greatest plays in American literature collected in one volume This important new omnibus edition features an illuminating foreword by playwright John Guare and an extensive afterword for each play drawing on unpublished letters and other unique documentary material prepared by Tappan Wilder. Our Town—Wilder's timeless 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning look at love, death, and destiny is celebrated around the world and performed at least once each day in the United States. The Skin of our Teeth—Wilder's 1942 romp about human follies and human endurance starring the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1943. The Matchmaker—Wilder's brilliant 1954 farce about money and love starring that irrepressible busybody Dolly Gallagher Levi. This play inspired the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly!.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2 (B), University of Bamberg (Centre for British Studies), 10 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: When Wilder’s “The Skin of our Teeth” first came to the stage in 1942, the audience had difficulty understanding the play. Many of them left the theatre before the 3rd Act had started. The audience hadn’t shared the same background as Wilder and one could say that they weren’t ready for his play yet. However, most of the critics favoured the new play and Wilder received his third Pulitzer Prize for it. “The Skin of our Teeth” is strongly influenced by Wilder’s experience of two World Wars and his visit of English cities, which had been destroyed by German bombs, in 1941, where he was astonished by the “almost amused bewilderment”1 the British showed whilst facing the disasters of war.2 During the late 1930s Wilder studied the works of James Joyce and admits that “The Skin of our Teeth” is “deeply indebted to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake”3, whilst critics called it “an American re-creation, thinly disguised”4 with reference to the Joycean novel. He borrowed ideas from many other authors like André Obey. A second source of inspiration, every bit as important to “The Skin of our Teeth” as the highbrow “Finnegan’s Wake”, was the lowbrow, popular entertainment of the day: the burlesque. Especially the work of the American comedians Olsen and Johnson shows a certain affinity to Wilder’s play. Wilder did not see himself as an innovator, but a man who tried to keep the craft of writing alive. “I am not an innovator, but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive bric á brac”5 1 Erwin Häberle, Das szenische Werk Thornton Wilders (Heidelberg 1967) pp. 91 2 ibid. pp. 91-107 3 Thornton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays (1962) p.14 4 Rex Burbank, Thornton Wilder (Boston 1961), p.101 5 Thorton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays (1962), p.14

Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town

“Luiselli follows in the imaginative tradition of writers like Borges and Márquez, but her style and concerns are unmistakably her own. This deeply playful novel is about the passion and obsession of collecting, the nature of storytelling, the value of objects, and the complicated bonds of family. . . Luiselli has become a writer to watch, in part because it’s truly hard to know (but exciting to wonder about) where she will go next.”—The New York Times I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming. Highway is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the "notorious infamous" like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli's own literary influences. Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's. Her novel, The Story of My Teeth, is the winner of the LA Times Book Prize in Fiction.

The second and concluding volume of Thornton Wilder's short plays.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novel—by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth—has been beloved around the world for nearly a century. This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individuals—a noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a child—come to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined lives—snuffed out in one shattering moment—illuminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.