Foreword in The Ides of March

Vonnegut wrote a Foreword in The Ides of March, a 1948 novel by Thornton Wilder that was republished by HarperCollins' Perennial Library in 2003.

Summary

Thornton Wilder, 1948

Thornton Wilder may be the only American writer to excel as both a novelist and playwright. The Ides of March, published when Wilder was 51, was his fifth novel and he'd already seen four of his plays produced. This includes the 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner Our Town, which—at the time Vonnegut was writing this foreword in August 2002—was being produced to packed theaters six miles north of his home in Sagaponack. Wilder was famous and respected until his death in 1975 and has remained so to the present. He taught French at a prep school in New Jersey and continued to be a teacher, not only at the University of Chicago and Harvard, but through his writings, in which he encouraged his readers to enjoy knowledge and "a life of informed reasoning" just as he had. His works continue to do that. The Julius Caesar of this book is literate and modern, and while set in ancient Rome, the character could be "a brilliant and all-too-human dictator of modern times", especially when written in an era of new Caesars like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. Like his play The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder seems to be saying that human nature does not change.

Unlike his contemporaries Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, and Ernest Hemingway, Wilder never won a Nobel Prize for Literature, perhaps because of this "lack of immediacy and urgency". This epistolary novel, without dialogue or narrative, forces the reader to draw conclusions based on nothing but a collection of documents, unlike the pageantry of the Caesar of Shakespeare or Shaw. Like many educated people of his generation—such as Vonnegut's father, Kurt, Sr.—Wilder could read Latin, which educators thought strengthened the minds of students. Vonnegut cannot and thus has missed the two thousand year time travel which was once not uncommon and made this book possible. Removing Latin from the curriculum was probably the United States' attempt to end any education that was seemingly ornamental. All historical novels are science fiction since they involve time travel, such as Mark Twain's famous A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Unlike Twain, however, Wilder saw nothing inherently inferior about the past when compared to modernity. If Vonnegut were offered a million dollars to say something bad about Wilder, not a single word would come to mind, especially since "apolitical" is not a bad word.