American playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder was BOTD in 1897. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, he was raised in China where his father was stationed as US Consul General, and later in California. He served briefly in the US Army during World War One, then studied at Yale and Princeton Universities. After the war, he moved to Paris, socialising with American expatriates Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. His 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; 40 years later, his novel The Eighth Day won the National Book Award for Fiction. He is best known for his 1938 play Our Town, now a classic of 20th-century American theatre, about forgotten lives in a small New Hampshire town. The play won him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making him the only American writer to win in both fiction and drama categories. His 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth, a family drama echoing scenes from Biblical and classical history, won him a third Pulitzer Prize. After a fallow period, he had another hit with the 1954 comedy The Matchmaker, which became the basis for the musical Hello Dolly! A lifelong bachelor, he kept his homosexuality a secret, seldom addressing sexual themes in his work, and appears to have had no intimate relationships. He built a house for his family in 1930, where he lived for most of his life, dying in 1975 aged 78. The tattooist and pornographer Samuel Steward claimed in his 1981 memoirs that he and Wilder had been lovers in the 1930s, though this has been disputed by Wilder’s biographers.