Wilder, Thornton: 1897-1975

The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942 - Thematic Parallels: Survival

Survival generally means continuing to live or exist despite challenges, threats, or difficult conditions.
Wilder, Thornton: The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942
The play’s topic is humanity’s struggle for survival across time, highlighting both its vulnerability and its persistent will to endure.
The following books are thematically simliar. They lend themselves well to being read in groups, compared with one another, or used to teach a similar topic over an extended period with a class:
- Draper, Sharon: Copper Sun, 2006, ~300pp
  This is a novel about survival through the traumatic experience of slavery, highlighting endurance and hope.
  - Both texts present survival as a core aspect of the human experience—individual survival (Copper Sun) and collective, mythic survival (The Skin of Our Teeth). Both highlight that humanity is capable of both horror and goodness, depending on circumstance. They conclude by reaffirming that hope persists even after immense suffering.
- Lessing, Doris: The Fifth Child, 1988, ~130pp
  This novel deals with family dynamics and survival in a strained domestic environment.
  - Both works center on seemingly ordinary families whose lives are disrupted by an overwhelming, abnormal force. Both collapse the boundary between personal crisis (Lessing) and world crisis (Wilder), using domestic space as the staging ground for humanity’s broader anxieties. They envision human life as an ongoing struggle against forces beyond control, yet show families persisting through turmoil, however fractured.
- Prejean, Helen: Dead Man Walking, 1993, ~350pp
  This novel focuses on moral survival in the face of death penalty issues.
  - Both works examine how people respond morally, emotionally, and socially in the face of ongoing harm. Even amid suffering, there is hope for renewal—moral, spiritual, or civilizational.
- Williams, Tennessee: The Glass Menagerie, 1945, ~130pp
  This play explores psychological and emotional survival within family dynamics and societal pressures.
  - Both works explore the human capacity to endure hardship and maintain hope, albeit in very different ways—Williams through intimate family drama, Wilder through allegorical, larger-than-life catastrophes. Both challenge strict realism. Williams uses memory and symbolic objects; Wilder uses direct theatrical experimentation. In both cases, audience perception is guided as much by imagination as by literal events.
List of general discussion questions on Survival (pdf)
List of essay prompts on Survival (pdf)