Thornton Wilder - Personal Life

Personal Life

Although Wilder never discussed being gay publicly or in his writings, his close friend Samuel Steward is generally acknowledged to have been a lover. Wilder was introduced to Steward by Gertrude Stein, who at the time regularly corresponded with both of them. The third act of Our Town was famously drafted after a long walk, during a brief affair with Steward in Zurich, Switzerland.

Wilder had a wide circle of friends and enjoyed mingling with other famous people, including Ernest Hemingway, Russel Wright, Willa Cather, and Montgomery Clift.

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