Ten Things You Should Know About HEAVEN'S MY DESTINATION

1. When and where did Wilder write Heaven’s My Destination?

Heaven’s My Destination is Wilder’s fourth novel and the first to be set in the United States.

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.”

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. He completed the novel in September of 1934 at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s fabled ranch in Taos, New Mexico. Wilder also worked on the book while in Chicago, Kansas City, and New Haven.

2. What is the origin of the book’s title?

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 reads

George Brush is my name;
America's my nation;
Ludington's my dwelling-place
And Heaven's my destination.

As Wilder well knew, James Joyce used a variant of this verse in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1914. 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 Joycean language:

Stephen Dedalus is my name.
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwelling place
And heaven my expectation.

3. When and where was the novel published?

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 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. . . and the comic spirit is not either’) that they gave up their contracted right to it and let me carry it to Harpers.”

4. **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?**

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. He travelled by trains that brought him face-to-face with Depression-era America, especially in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

The Picaresque: This enduring literary genre can be traced to Spain. It depicts in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero living by his or her wits in a corrupt society. 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.

Farce: 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. Wilder’s portrait of the vernacular-speaking characters living in the American heartland coping with the Great Depression is, in part, another gesture of homage, this time to Nestroy’s genius for capturing the language, style and atmosphere of the culture of his great city.

**5. What makes Heaven’s My Destination uniquely American?**

George Brush is that uniquely American hero, determined, despite the Depression about him, to constantly improve himself and those around him; to launch a crusade each day as he wanders the American landscape, wrestling with social, economic and spiritual challenges while trying to leave old bedevilments behind; making good on promises, dreaming that American Dream of a New Start, of a Better Tomorrow. “You know me,” Wilder wrote to his family when he was writing Heaven: “Walt Whitman’s grandson; so sure of the immense greatness and coming-of-age of the American people. Any minute all the apparent vulgarity will be touched by the sudden want to Synthesis and we will be—plunk!—in the middle of a Great Age.”

**6. How autobiographical is Heaven’s My Destination?**

Very, according to Wilder. In a letter written to his editor upon completing the text:

“Naturally, I’m very fond of the book; it’s all about my father and my brother and myself, and my years among the missionaries in China, and my two years at Oberlin College, and the Texas and Oklahoma of my lecture tours.” Wilder said to a reporter in 1953, “George Brush, that’s me!

In addition to family members, several close friends find their way into characters in the book, among them world champion boxer Gene Tunney (who read Shakespeare when he shaved), and producer/director Jed Harris who later directed Wilder’s A Doll’s House and Our Town on Broadway later in the ‘30s (see the arrogant George Burkin).

7. How did Wilder describe the themes in Heaven?

He writes in 1932 to one of his closest friends in London:

“ The novel is very funny and very heartrending–a picaresque novel about a young traveling salesman in textbooks, very ‘fundamentalist’ pious, pure and his adventures among the shabby hotels, gas stations and hot dog stands of Eastern Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma etc. His education, or development from a Dakota ‘Bible-belt’ mind to a modern grossstadt tolerance in three years; i.e. the very journey the American mind has made in fifty years.”

To a fan in 1935: “It’s an Education Novel. . . I intended that everyone should find something of his or her self in George Brush,–and of the best of themselves, too.”

To his physician in New Haven in 1935: “Perhaps I should have used as his epigraph for Heaven’s My Destination some words from his 1930 novel, The Woman of Andros: “How do you live? What do you do first?”

8. How was the novel received by the public?

Very well. Heaven’s My Destination was the 7th Best Selling Novel of 1935, and scored a rare double as first choice for both the English Book Club and the Book-of-the -Month Club. Wilder royalties in 1935-36 amounted to some $27,000, no so small fortune in this period. Since publication the novel has been translated in nine languages, including German, French, Italian and Latvian.

9. How did critics receive it?

Enthusiastically, for the most part. But with their heads still full of the fabulously successful The Bridge of San Luis Rey, critics were surprised by a novel that seemed, as the American Book-of-the-Month Club put it, “a strange blend of Don Quixote, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Sinclair Lewis, while remaining thoroughly Thornton Wilder.” If confused by his intentions, most reviewers praised its humor and the way the author dealt with humor, education and the America heartland -- and the brave way the author took on questions of morality and religion. Wilder’s summary of opinion at the time to his attorney six months after publication? “My book’s selling like pancakes but almost everybody misunderstands it. I should worry. It’s no satire. The hero’s not a boob or a sap. George Brush at his best is everybody.”

10. What happened next?

For the remainder of the 1930s, Wilder concentrated on drama, with some teaching and with some lecturing in this country and abroad. In the late ‘30s he adapted Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, starring Ruth Gordon and directed by Jed Harris, which was a success on tour and on Broadway (1937-1938); wrote Our Town, which won the Pulitzer Prize (1938); wrote The Merchant of Yonkers, which was not a success on Broadway in late 1938, but reappeared, slightly transformed, to great success as The Matchmaker (1954).

Thornton Wilder returned to fiction in 1948 with The Ides of March, a novel set in Caesar’s time. Another two decades passed before he completed his sixth novel, The Eighth Day, which won 1967 American Book Award for Fiction. Are we surprised that Wilder once again returned to the American Midwest as the setting of this tale, Wilder’s American epic? And are we surprised that his heroes, this time both men and women, are earnest, good, humorless George Brush-types who, against all odds and with every reason to despair, say “yes” to the morning?

As Thornton Wilder was fond of saying, “Think it over.”

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