Thornton Wilder was widely regarded as an expert on the Irish author James Joyce, and Wilder freely acknowledged that he wrote The Skin of Our Teeth partly as a tribute to Joyce’s final novel, Finnegan’s Wake (1939). But despite Wilder’s openness about the influence of Joyce’s work on his play, two literary critics— Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson—accused Wilder of having written “an Americanized recreation, thinly disguised” of Joyce’s novel. Although they did not use the word “plagiarism” in the two articles they wrote for The Saturday Review of Literature, that was clearly what they meant, and it didn’t take long for the word to appear in press reports about the controversy.
The charge was not only baseless; it was ridiculous as well, and the accusations were promptly rejected by literary experts. Wilder responded by writing a letter to the Review, but he ultimately decided not to send it; consequently, the letter wasn’t discovered until after Wilder’s death. In the letter, Wilder thoroughly debunks his detractors’ arguments and demonstrates, with characteristic intelligence and humor, that they not only misunderstood The Skin of Our Teeth, but also Finnegan’s Wake and most of Western literature as well.
Wilder understood that all literature is inevitably influenced by the writings that precede it, and that this is especially true of works such as The Skin of Our Teeth that deal in myths and archetypes. As Wilder wrote in his rebuttal letter, “It is not necessary to go to Joyce’s novel to find the motive of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Lilith and Noah.” No single author can claim to have actually “invented” a mythic hero such as Achilles or Professor X or Harry Potter, or a mythic heroine such as Hippolyta or Kitty Pryde or Ellie (from The Last of Us), any more than a musician can claim to have “invented” jazz or rock or metal.
Sometimes individuals try to make these claims, often to the point of bringing absurd lawsuits against artists such as playwright Tom Stoppard and singer-songwriters Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, who they maintain stole “their” work. But these assertions reveal a profound lack of understanding about how creativity actually operates. Powerful works of literature or drama or music resonate not because their characters or lyrics or melodies are new, but because their creators use them in new ways to represent fundamental human struggles. Ironically, Joseph Campbell himself would go on to establish a reputation as an expert on myths and archetypes; George Lucas credited Campbell’s best-known work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), with inspiring Lucas’s own creation of the character Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies.
Fortunately for us, Thornton Wilder understood exactly how creativity works, and the members of the Antrobus family in The Skin of Our Teeth still resonate with audiences today because, as the characters themselves observe, they’re thousands of years old. George, Maggie, Henry, Gladys, and Sabina feel familiar not because Wilder copied them from a novel that had just been written a couple of years before, but because they’ve been around forever. Wilder’s genius lies in his ability to achieve the delicate balance between presenting characters who are universal enough to be relatable, but who are distinctive enough to seem real. We feel deeply for all of them, because even though they are completely believable as themselves, at the same time they also seem to resemble each and every one of us.
Taylor Swift The 1989 World Tour Ford Field.For more on the controversy, including Thornton Wilder’s letter, see the Afterword by Tappan Wilder to the 2003 edition of The Skin of Our Teeth. For a satirical piece by the American editor and humorist Wolcott Gibbs that skewers Campbell and Robinson’s “discovery,” see “Finnegan’s Teeth,” The New Yorker Magazine (December 26, 1942).