By the time Wilder started writing the novel, he had read Don Quixote- the classic statement of a Picaresque novel-in three languages and was teaching the text at the University of Chicago and lecturing on it through the university’s extension program.įarce: Also the subject of his teaching, Wilder’s fascination with farce was deepened by a passionate encounter in this period not only by his immersion in the Roman plays of Plautus and Terence, but especially the theatre of the 19th Century Viennese actor and playwright, Johann Nestroy.
It depicts in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero living by his or her wits in a corrupt society. The Picaresque: This enduring literary genre can be traced to Spain. He travelled by trains that brought him face-to-face with Depression-era America, especially in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Wilder’s experiences while traveling across the country during the depression: Between March 1929 and February 1934, Wilder delivered 113 lectures in the USA and Canada. In addition to Wilder’s passion for understanding his country and his own life, what sources and influences helped to shape Heaven’s My Destination? and the comic spirit is not either’) that they gave up their contracted right to it and let me carry it to Harpers.” 4. Wilder wrote a close friend later that his first publishers, Albert & Charles Boni, “so disliked Heaven’s My Destination (‘the American scene is not natural to you. Heaven’s My Destination was published in England by Longmans, Green and Company, on December 3, 1934, and in the United States by Harper & Brothers on January 2, 1935.
Wilder’s novel is also a coming-of-age story, and we may understand Wilder’s variant as his homage to Joyce’s great story. The title shows up in the novel's first epigraph, taken, Wilder explains, from "Doggerel verse which children of the Middle West were accustomed to write in their schoolbooks." It readsĪs Wilder well knew, James Joyce used a variant of this verse in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1914. Wilder also worked on the book while in Chicago, Kansas City, and New Haven.
He completed the novel in September of 1934 at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s fabled ranch in Taos, New Mexico. Wilder began serious work on Heaven’s My Destination in June of 1932 at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the writer’s colony where he later drafted significant portions of Our Town. The first glimpse of the novel appears in a journal entry of June 23, 1930: “Ideas for Novels or Novellas- Picaresque: Baptist ‘Don Quixote.’ Selling educational textbooks through Texas, Oklahoma.” Heaven’s My Destination is Wilder’s fourth novel and the first to be set in the United States. When and where did Wilder write Heaven’s My Destination?
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