When Thornton Wilder wore his glasses, which was much of the time, he had a mild, professorial air—like an owl, some said. Catch him without spectacles, though, and the change was extreme. His blue eyes had what one reporter called “a blade-like sharpness”. They reminded you that behind his genial demeanour lay “one of the toughest and most complicated minds in contemporary America”.

There, in brief, is the Wilder conundrum. When he is remembered today, it is almost always in his owl persona, as the folksy author of a folksy play, Our Town. But this gets both play and author almost completely backward. Our Town isn’t a nostalgic wallow in small-town life, it’s a harrowing story about human limitation—all the beauty and value we fail to recognise in our day-to-day lives.

A Wilder boomlet of recent years—a new collection of his plays, a new anthology of his letters to fellow cosmopolitans like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, a revival of Our Town currently off-Broadway—has just entered an especially captivating phase. The Library of America has republished his first five novels. They are also as compelling today as when they first appeared between 1925 and 1948.

For people who know Wilder only via his plays, the mere existence of these books may come as a surprise. In fact, his fiction came before his drama. Though he won a Pulitzer for Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, he’d already collected one in 1928 for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Even now, he remains the only writer to be so recognised in both art forms.

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