Four of Thornton Wilder’s most acclaimed works, adapted for BBC Radio – plus bonus material exploring his life and career

Thornton Wilder is one of America’s most important literary figures. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times – for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth – and is the only person to be awarded the Pulitzer for both fiction and drama. Included here are four of his key works, set in different times and places, but sharing the same fundamental motifs – the universality of human experience and our search for life’s meaning.

Our Town, his timeless tale of love, marriage, birth and death in a small American community, stars Ed Bishop, William Roberts and Liza Ross. It is preceded by a 10-minute introductory extract from Free Thinking, in which presenter Anne McElvoy and actor/director David Cromer discuss the play’s themes and techniques.

Wilder’s masterpiece, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, tells the story of the five victims of a bridge collapse, and the eyewitness who sets out to understand why they were fated to die. A poignant philosophical fable, it features a stellar cast including Annette Badland, Robert Glenister, Tom Goodman-Hill and Helen McCrory.

Adapted from the play by Jerome Kilty, The Ides of March is based on Wilder’s epistolary novel centred around the last days of the Roman republic, and stars Robert Hardy as Julius Caesar. Next, Ed Bishop reads from Heaven’s My Destination, the comic tale of an amateur philosopher who leaves a trail of chaos wherever he goes.

Finally, in a fascinating episode of Front Row, Mark Lawson, theatre director David Lan and New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow discuss how Wilder became a literary icon, and launched a quiet revolution in American theatre.