The combined population of Patagonia-Sonoita-Elgin is less than the 2,642 souls living in the provincial setting of the play Our Town.
So it may not have been surprising that Thornton Wilder mentioned Patagonia more than once to interviewers in early 1962 when contemplating a retreat to the Southwest where he would live “without cultivated conversation.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright had been familiar with the area around Tucson since the 1930s and planned to make use of the University of Arizona library. Whether he had actually been to Patagonia is not clear but he definitely liked the name.
An intellectual’s intellectual (he was acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sigmund Freud), Wilder wanted to live incognito while “recharging his batteries” and fulfilling a desire to write a long novel, an American epic. At the same time he was fond of drink and liked to keep late hours. He told one interviewer that he never drank alone and looked forward to closing the bars at his Patagonia destination.
Wilder wasn’t bashful around strangers. He was an optimist about America and Americans. Ruth Gordon, the actress and life-long friend of Wilder, wrote in her autobiography that he put on goodness and unworldliness even at a Park Avenue soiree, “Sometimes he listened to troubles, ears big as Red Riding Hood’s wolfy grandma, sometimes he was friend and teacher of life, literature, language, philosophy, music, art, history, and you understood it when he finished.”
Unfortunately, a martini-laced interview with the New York Times (April 15, 1962) revealed too much about Wilder’s planned “loafer’s life” in Patagonia. He received so many welcoming letters from realtors and civic organizations that he soured on Patagonia.
So, leaving his Connecticut home in a 1957 Ford Thunderbird convertible and crossing into Arizona on U.S. Route 80, Wilder got no further than Douglas in Cochise County, a booming mining town at the time. Most accounts state that his Thunderbird broke down, but in any case, Wilder checked into the Gadsden Hotel and later moved into an apartment.
Over the next 18 months Wilder rubbed elbows with locals on both sides of the border (he knew Spanish well). By the time he left in late November 1963 he had shaped the work of fiction that became “The Eighth Day,” a novel about a small mining town in Illinois. It won the National Book Award in 1968.
In later years, other authors did find their way to Patagonia. At least one was legend for rubbing elbows with the locals at The Wagon Wheel.
This sketch was inspired by “My Side: The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon” (1976), a copy of which was found at The Little Free Library at the Sonoita crossroads. Additional information was sourced from “Thornton Wilder’s Desert Oasis,” published in the July 2009 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, and the 2006 reissue of “The Eighth Day,” which has a foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder.