Please read this poem before class and try to find  the similiarity between this poem and Our Town in context (historical background)

                       In Time of "The Breaking of Nations" 

                            (alluding to outbreak of World War I )

                                                 By Thomas Hardy

                          Only a man harrowing clods 

                          In a slow silent walk 

                          With an old horse that stumbles and nods 

                          Half asleep as they stalk. 

                         Only thin smoke without flame 

                          From the heaps of couch-grass; 

                         Yet this will go onward the same 

                         Though Dynasties pass. 

                         Yonder a maid and her wight 

                         Come whispering by: 

                         War's annals will cloud into night 

                         Ere their story die.   

         (With reference to the ending of To Live by Yu Huo)

I. Context of the play  

   Thornton Wilder:

     Born  in 1897; graduated fromYale University in 1920; started writing on the side; awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and quickly became a literary celebrity, keeping company with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.

     Turned to playwriting. Our Town, his most celebrated dramatic effort, opened on Broadway in 1938, ventually won Wilder his second Pulitzer Prize, and went on to become one of the most performed American plays of the twentieth century.

     The Time Set in the Play: 1913

    Act I: 1901  Daily life (in the morning, afternoon, and evening), birth

    Act II: 1904 (3 years later)  Love and marriage,  growth / youth

    Act III: 1913(9 years later) Death, childbirth, the afterlife

                                 (World War I: 1914 –1918)

      The Production of the Play: 1938

                                 (World War II: 1939 -- 1945)   

    World War II was on the horizon when the play hit theaters in 1938. It was a time of tremendous international tension, and citizens across the globe suffered from fear and uncertainty. Our Town directed attention away from these negative aspects of life in the late 1930s and focused instead on the aspects of the human experience that make life precious. Wilder revealed his faith in the stability and constancy of life through his depiction and discussion of the small town of Grover’s Corners, with its “marrying . . . living and . . . dying.”