Wilder was an Oberlin College freshman when he wrote this playlet, published as
Brother Fire: A Comedy for Saints in the May 1916 issue of the
Oberlin Literary Magazine. Wilder’s favorite professor, Dr. Charles H.A. Wager, was a classical scholar and an expert on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, and it is likely that his contact with Prof. Wager led to a playlet clearly inspired by these lines from Saint Francis’s
Canticle of the Sun, written in about 1224, two years before his death:
“Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.”
Wilder visited Assisi on his first trip to Italy in 1920-21. In the late ’50s and ’60s, Wilder attempted to write seven one-act plays depicting the Seven Deadly Sins. Someone from Assisi – representing the Sin of Lust – stars none other than the same St. Francis long before he became a saint. It ran successfully at off-Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theater in 1961-1962, alongside two Ages of Man. It was translated into Italian and was subsequently very well received by Italian audiences.
Wilder conceived this playlet to be part a series of “Footnotes to Biographies” suggested by the miniature portraits in Herbert Eulenberg’s Schattenbilder.