An acclaimed novelist and playwright, Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928), Our Town (1938), and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). Wilder's other honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.

Theophilus North, published in 1973, was the last major work of Thornton Wilder (a number of one-act plays have been published posthumously). He said himself, "Not bad at seventy-five, wot?" The book is not autobiographical, although the character of Theophilus shares many similarities with Wilder. To write it he returned to episodes from his young manhood for material, serving in the Coast Guard in Newport, Rhode Island, graduating from Yale University, teaching at the prestigious Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Theophilus North comes to Newport with all of these experiences and proceeds to set to rights the lives of the people of Newport. But the book is shaped by a lifetime of learning and writing, and the point of view of the young North is always balanced against the wisdom of the narrator who looks back affectionately on the brash confidence of his alter ego.

Theophilus North is a kunstleroman, a novel about the development of an artist. North helps those he can at least as much for the new experiences as for any moral reason. Then he writes "characters" of the people he has met, and the details of the escapade in his journal. Thus he develops the tools of a writer: acute perceptions, a capacious memory, and the ability to work hard at his writing. At the end of the novel the car mechanic who has read the work that North has left carelessly in his old jalopy points him in the direction of his ultimate career, one for which he has been prepared by his adventurous summer.

Some critics have claimed that Wilder's works are sentimental. Wilder, of course, rejected this notion. In his journal on February 3, 1940, Wilder wrote, "A sentimentalist (and the pessimist is here included as identical) is one whose desire that things be happy (or sad) exceeds his desire (and suppressed knowledge) that things be truthful; he demands that he be lied to." Theophilus North is fiction, but it is true to Wilder's vision of America; a place where people can recreate themselves in numbers of lives. In such a country, life is tragic only if you allow it to be.