Wilder wrote a close friend later that his first publishers, Albert & Charles Boni, “so disliked Heaven’s My Destination (‘the American scene is not natural to you. Heaven’s My Destination was published in England by Longmans, Green and Company, on December 3, 1934, and in the United States by Harper & Brothers on January 2, 1935. Wilder’s novel is also a coming-of-age story, and we may understand Wilder’s variant as his homage to Joyce’s great story. The title shows up in the novel's first epigraph, taken, Wilder explains, from "Doggerel verse which children of the Middle West were accustomed to write in their schoolbooks." It readsĪs Wilder well knew, James Joyce used a variant of this verse in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1914. Wilder also worked on the book while in Chicago, Kansas City, and New Haven. He completed the novel in September of 1934 at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s fabled ranch in Taos, New Mexico. Wilder began serious work on Heaven’s My Destination in June of 1932 at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the writer’s colony where he later drafted significant portions of Our Town. The first glimpse of the novel appears in a journal entry of June 23, 1930: “Ideas for Novels or Novellas- Picaresque: Baptist ‘Don Quixote.’ Selling educational textbooks through Texas, Oklahoma.” Heaven’s My Destination is Wilder’s fourth novel and the first to be set in the United States. When and where did Wilder write Heaven’s My Destination?
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