Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He grewup mostly in California, with substantial time in China. He started writingplays in high school and continued during his time at Oberlin College andat Yale College. After teaching at the Lawrenceville School in his twenties,he earned an M.A. in French at Princeton University. He received PulitzerPrizes for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, as well as for his plays,Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. Wilder was awarded the German PeacePrize in 1957 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. A peripatetictraveler, he became one of the most global of citizens. Hence, the perspectiveswhich he offers in the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in1951–1952, on the making of an American language, arise from an unusualgrasp of both center and periphery, of his country and the world. His laternovels, The Eighth Day and Theophilus North, only amplified his contributionsas a major force in the cultural life of the twentieth-century Western world.Linda Williams taught at the Urban Waldorf School in Milwaukee and iscurrently a class teacher at Detroit Waldorf School. She graduated fromthe Waldorf Institute of Mercy College in 1986, and completed her M.A.in education at Mercy. An Assistant Professor at the University of DetroitMercy, Linda heads the elementary program for the Waldorf Teacher DevelopmentAssociation and is working on her doctorate in literacy educationat Michigan State University.Michael Winship has worked as a musician in Europe for many years and asa Waldorf high school history teacher. Currently associate professor of historyat the University of Georgia, Michael wrote Seers of God: Puritan Providentialismin the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UniversityPress,1996) and is soon to publish Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism andFree Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton University Press).Dorit Winter is founder and director of the San Francisco Waldorf TeacherTraining of Rudolf Steiner College. Her most recent books are Because ofYolanda, Golden Gate Publications and Sheets of White Light, a collection ofshort stories, Rudolf Steiner College Press, 1999.354