By mapping the contour of Thornton Wilder s major plays and novels, this book offers a fresh reading of his deceptively unfashionable art of allegorical narrative, and aims to reaffirm Malcolm Cowley s perspicacious judgment: -(Wilder is) one of the toughest and most complicated minds in contemporary America.- After a review of the history and scholarship of allegory, the author chronologically traces Wilder s extensive, complex and resilient engagement with allegory, a genre employed not only for literary manifestation but for philosophical inquiry. Moving expertly from Wilder s early...