It is full of the wisdom of the ages - as well as satirical observations on man's political instability, loves, joys and terrors. Wilder has written a book of great philosophical import. Wilder has a brilliant and an irresistibly convincing technique for historical novel writing, for it presents both authority and intimacy, and there is a strange excitement in their shared aegis.īut what makes "The Ides of March" one of the really great books of our generation is, it seems to me, the fact that within the framework of a brilliant historical reconstruction Mr. Wilder calls "fantasia" that only another deep classical scholar could untangle them. Known historic fact and records are so commingled with what Mr. Its technique immediately convinces him that fact, and fact only, is passing before his eyes, for the entire book is made up of contemporary recordings, mostly in letters or journals, occasionally in official documents, sometimes of quotations from historians of a generation or so later. But his labeling of the novel as a "suppositional reconstruction" does not convince the reader that it is a fantasia, for never has a historical novel been written which gives the reader a more convincing sense of reality. It may be called a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic," declares Mr. "Historical reconstruction is not among the primary aims of this work. "The Ides of March" has as background the six months which preceded the fatal Ides of March, 44 B.C.
Just as Thornton Wilder gave to creative philosophic novel writing a new pattern in his "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," a new pattern to one-act plays in his "The Long Christmas Dinner," and a new pattern to American folk drama in "Our Town," he gives in "The Ides of March" a new pattern to the historical novel. Only those who are masters of the rules, down to their minutest details, can manipulate those rules creatively - that is, to create a new pattern of rules. In "The Ides of March" Thornton Wilder has, as he has always done in his writing, combined wide classical knowledge with true creative experimentation. is that it is human nature which does not change, no matter the era or situation." Here's a look back at the original Chicago Tribune review of the book. 'The Ides of March,' while set in Rome, might well be about a brilliant and all-too-human dictator in modern times, and what it could be like for the men and women who are close to one. wrote, "the Julius Caesar in this book, literate, well read, unburdened by ignorance and superstition, is in all respects a modern man. In the foreword to a 2003 edition, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Editor's note: This year, to mark the Ides of March, we revisit not Shakespeare, but Thornton Wilder's 1948 epistolary novel of Julius Caesar's Rome.
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