Fascinated by Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of nine cities overlapping each other during excavations in Troy, novelist Thornton Wilder’s protagonist in Theophilus North conducts a literary excavation of Newport, Rhode Island. Teddy North identifies nine distinct cities, describing them as “variously beautiful, impressive, absurd, commonplace, and one very nearly squalid.” 1 In North’s Newport of 1926, life’s absurdities still revolved around an impressive American aristocracy, served by the apparently commonplace, and shadowed by denizens of the squalid city—tabloid journalists, crashers or those shunned by genteel society for sensational misdeeds.
