OUR TOWN with an AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS)

New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., (1938). First Edition. Hardcover. Some sunning to covers. About Very Good, lacking the dustwrapper. The letter has a crease from folding, otherwise Fine, with envelope. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a touchstone of American theater. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the half-title page: "For Roger Seccombe/with the best wishes of/Thornton Wilder/New Haven/November/1938." Laid in is a 2-page AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS) "Thornton Wilder" written on the recto and verso of a single sheet of personal stationery addressed to Seccombe and inserted in a handwritten, postmarked envelope addressed by Wilder to Roger Seccombe dated 25 October 1941 tipped in at the front endpaper. In full: "Many thanks for your letter. It is a great pleasure to hear from any relative or friend of my friend whom I admire so much. I wish I were in Chicago and could have some talks with your son. However, I rejoined the faculty this past summer alone, after four years' absence, and do not foresee when I shall return there again. This is a double disappointment, because I should also like to ask him many questions about Antioch -- a place which all teachers watch with such interest. I have just returned from England where I spent the month of September and I am very eager -- if all my accumulated work will only permit -- to go up to Peterboro and tell Mary of all the absorbing and sad and finally magnificent things I saw there. Tell your son that I hope to see him some day and never to hesitate to call on me, if he hears that I am in the vicinity. Sincerely yours, Thornton Wilder." In September of 1941, Wilder went to England to attend a congress of the International PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) Club. The main theme of the congress was "Literature and the World after the War," but the heart of the issue was the responsibility of the writer in time of war. Wilder was part of a vocal group that opposed the president of British PEN, Storm Jameson, who insisted that members commit themselves exclusively to propaganda for the Allied cause. (Stein, Gertrude; Wilder; Thornton; Burns, Edward McNall; Dydo, Ulla E.; Rice, William. THE LETTERS OF GERTRUDE STEIN AND THORNTON WILDER. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006; page 297). When not caught up in navigating the politics of PEN, Wilder wrote to American educational philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins that his days in London, "were crowded with inspections of ruins, defense activities, airplane factories, bomber commands, luncheons, interviews with works, journalists. Ministers, dinners, writers, and so on" (Wilder, Thornton; Wilder, Robin G.; Bryer, Jackson R. THE SELECTED LETTERS OF THORNTON WILDER. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009; page 400). It is perhaps to this variety of experiences while in London which Wilder refers in this letter when he says, "I have just returned from England where I spent the month of September and I am very eager -- if all my accumulated work will only permit -- to go up to Peterboro and tell Mary of all the absorbing and sad and finally magnificent things I saw there."