Our town was Wilder's town too
New biography sheds light on Thornton Wilder, the influence of his childhood and his love of Chicago striver Amos Parker Wilder, had a sophisticated and peripatetic, if perennially impecunious, youth. His father, somewhat of a benign control freak, dragged Thornton and his siblings (Amos, Charlotte, Isabel and, eventually, Janet) from Madison, Wis., to Hong Kong, to Berkeley, Calif., to Shanghai. And being a stickle…