Thornton Wilder's birthday

From today's Writers Almanac: It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). He's best known for his play Our Town (1938). Wilder said, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind — not in things, not in 'scenery' … [a play] needs only five square feet of boarding and a passion to know what life means to us."

Thornton Wilder said, "I am not interested in … such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions."