The February 2009 issue of The Believer features an article on the early novels of Thornton Wilder, books written before he wrote the plays for which he is now mostly remembered, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.

“A Partisan of Eternity,” by Christopher R. Beha, details how the contemporary critics of those first three novels slammed Wilder for ignoring what they considered to be the fundamental issues of his age. The following intriguing quote doesn’t specifically touch on that main thrust, but rather on Wilder’s thoughts when creating a story:

“It seems to me that my books are about: what is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources that one has to oppose it,” he wrote not long before the crash, in a letter included in the new and generous Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. “In other words: when a human being is made to bear more than [a] human can bear—what then?”

This makes a good companion to the other question I’ve ben advised a writer should ask when deciding whether he or she has chosen the proper protagonist for a story—

Who hurts?