The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays.

WILDER, Thornton.

$200.00

Item Number: 145431

New York: Coward-McCann, Inc, 1928.

Signed limited first edition of this collection of three-minute plays by American playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder. Imperial octavo, original cloth, pictorial endpapers, tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait of Wilder photographed by Doris Ulmann. One of seven-hundred and seventy-five copies signed by the author on the limitation page, this is number 726. In very good condition.

Thornton Wilder explained that almost all the playlets in the book are religious, "but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer's concession to a contemporary standard of good manners." Intended only to be read and not performed, the title play, 'The Angel That Troubled the Waters,' is an an allegorical perspective on the health of physicians, based on the biblical story found in the Gospel of John, Chapter 5, verses 1-4, which tells the story of a pool called Bethesda, where an angel would occasionally stir the waters and heal those with physical infirmities waiting within. In Wilder’s drama, a doctor in need of healing for an unidentified ailment, labeled a newcomer, arrives at the pool. He appears free of physical disease and is denied access. The physician is described as “broken on the wheels of living,” a unique description of mental illness at a time when depression was disparaged by the larger society (Joshua Niforatos and Gregory W. Rutecki, Journal of General Internal Medicine).