STRATFORD, Conn--"There is no man in America whose words will carry farther around the earth." So wrote Archibald MacLeish, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, about Thornton Wilder, also a triple Pulitzer recipient. Yet Wilder's position in letters remains perplexing, for he is, at 78, something of a homeless and neglected was if.

He is the author of six novels and winner of the Gold Medal for Fiction. But ask novelists about him and they'll tell you he's a playwright. His Our Town, which premiered in 1938, has been performed more frequently than any other American play ever written. But ask theater folk to list a half dozen American dramatists and his name is unlikely to appear. Press them about Wilder and they'll tell you he's the novelist who wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder is a man of incredible learning in many subjects (such as the dating of Cope de Vega's early works, or Palestrina's technique of counterpoint), a master of classroom teaching, and a former professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard. But mention his name to scholars and they'll dismiss him as a creative writer. He can't win; praised by some, condemned by others, he is overlooked by most.

Wilder has written of his growing conviction that "the theater is the greatest of the arts." Over the years he has turned put a sizeable number of plays, running from three minutes to three hours. His position as a dramatist, however, rests largely on three full-evening works: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth (a revival of which will open at the Colonial Theater in Boston on August 51, and The Matchmaker. A small number, to be sure: but Chekhov's rightly elevated rank as a dramatist tests on only four plays, while Webster, Wycherly, Sheridan, Beaumarchais, Biichner and Rostand enjoy renown on the basis of two each.

Turning to an American play for only the third time in its history, the American Shakespeare Theater has chosen to offer Our Town this summer. There are some who have proclaimed this the greatest of all American plays. I wouldn't subscribe to that verdict, but think it certainly ranks in the top dozen.

In some circles people take a condescending view of the work, meeting at its heavy doses of nostalgia, sentimentality, and homespun platitudes. But if the realm of art is wide enough to contain such bleak and pessimistic views of man and the world as Shakespeare's King Lear, Sartre's No Exit, and Beckett's Endgame, then it is wide enough to contain Wilder's warm, gentle, compassionate and hopeful approach. Wilder early reacted against the tradition of naturalism, with its emphasis on the seamy and sordid side of life, and has by nature tended to look through rose-colored glasses. But anyone who can't tell the difference between Our Town and a Kate Douglas Wiggin novel or an Andy Hardy movie is just plain obtuse.

In a second kind of reaction against slice-of-life dramaturgy and realistic settings, Wilder dispensed almost entirely with scenery and props. "In a 1941 exposition of his theory of drama, he said a play should be aimed at the group mind and be based on pretense. Later he wrote that "the novel is preeminently the vehicle of the unique occasion, the theater of the generalized one."

It was his belief that he could reach a wider audience by forcing each spectator to create his own setting from his imagination and his own personal experience, a more authentic reality thereby resulting. University was Wilder's goal, as he made clear near the conclusion of his off-the-cuff talk to 15,000 people at Harvard's 1951 graduation (at the end of which President Conant called Wilder's remarks "the most significant I have ever heard from an academic man on a commencement program"). Wilder stated: "All literature is one expression of one human life experience. And when James Joyce plays upon 24 languages as upon a clever [we shouldn't] find it preposterous. All the languages in the world are but local differentiations of one planetary tongue."

In Our Town Wilder brings the usually unseen Stage Manager on stage. We see him suggest the Locale--Grover's Corners. New Hampshire--by bringing in some plain wooden chairs and a couple of tables, to which are added, as needed, a plank and, for a second-story window scene, a pair of step ladders. The Stage Manager also narrates background for us, guides the players, bridges time gaps, comments on what happens, doubles as a druggist, minister and an unnamed the woman (in early drafts of the play he took on several of the children's roles to boot), and dismisses us after each act.

He serves besides as Wilder's mouthpiece; and, in fact. Wilder himself played the part for a fortnight on Broadway and occasionally there after in summer stock. In a way. Our Town is almost as much an illustrated lecture as a play.

Our Town struck its early audiences as highly unorthodox (partly because it lacked the normal theatrical suspense and conflict), but it was welcomed across the country in every city except Boston, where its chilly reception caused the run to be halved. Actually, Wilder's technique here evolved out of his own one-act plays of 1931, especially Pullman Car Hiawatha, where we find no scenery, minimal props, the versatile Stage Manager, and even the very name of Grover's Corners (located in Ohio this time, however), not to mention the prototype of Emily's valedictory apostrophe to the world.

Even so, Wilder claimed no credit for invention. In the preface to an edition of three of his plays, he says, "I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive bric-a-brac." In Elizabethan times, after all, Shakespeare's plays were performed with few trappings. One need only read the Prologue to Henry V. which is an eloquent apologia for this manner of staging.

But Wilder acknowledges a more important influence, namely, certain traditional types of Oriental theater. As a youngster Wilder lived and went to school in Shanghai and Hong Kong for a time. In the abovementioned preface he notes that in Chinese drama an actor may straddle a stick to suggest horseback riding, and that in the Japanese Noh theater a circling of the stage may stand for a long journey. He might have added that the centuries-old Noh drama uses no curtain and no change of lighting. The plays are acted with few or no props beyond a fan, which may represent a cup of wine or a deadly weapon. We know, too, that Wilder was deeply affected by seeing the art of Mei Lan-fang when the late Chinese star visited New York and moved many observers to proclaim him the greatest actor in the world. Mei was the supreme master of mime and symbolic gesture, and his dramas made do with the same kind of simple table and straight chairs that the Stage Manager brings in at the start of Our Town. When Our Town opened. Wilder wrote, in the New York Times. "The theater longs to represent the symbols of things, not the things themselves."

For all the attempts, in many of the plays of Brecht to keep the audience at a distance and emotionally uninvolved, through the use of didactic songs narrative, cardboard characterization, projected titles, and other devices, Brecht's content is often so potent that we are sucked up willy-nilly--as in Mother Courage and Galileo. Similarly, Our Town, despite its lack of verisimilitude, rarely falls to sweep us up into the lives of its simple characters; and anyone who cant sit through its (somewhat too short) final act with dry eyes is nobody I should care to know.

Wilder has himself carefully prescribed in the text the myriad details of staging, so that, at a basic level, there is not much a director need do. Thus it is a hard play to ruin, which explains part of its appeal to high-school and other amateur groups with their often untrained directors. Nonetheless, a skilled director and gifted players can raise Our Town to an exalting experience, and that is exactly what Michael Kahn and his charges have achieved here.

In one respect, Kahn has made a fascinating departure from Wilder's script. I refer to the matter of sound effects, where the director has out-Wildered Wilder--and I bet the playwright would applaud. While there are many things that Wilder does not want us to see, he does want us to hear them. Some of these are distant--like a whistling train, a factory work-whistle, and chirping crickets on a moonlit night. Others, however, are on-stage things that are wholly imaginary--like the milkman's horse and his clanking bottles, and Mr. Webb's lawnmower.