The play is set in the fictional community of Grover's Corners. Through the actions of the Stage Manager, the town of Grover's Corners is created for the audience and scenes from its history between the years of 1901 and 1913 play out.
Our Town is a story of character development that details the interactions between citizens of an everyday town in the early twentieth century through their everyday lives (particularly the lives of George Gibbs, a doctor's son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of a newspaper editor).
Throughout the play, the Stage Manager conducts the story being told, taking questions from the audience, describing the locations and making key observations about the world he or she creates for the audience.
This "man of the hour" also plays several different but key roles within the story he or she tells, such as a preacher and the owner of a soda shop and an old woman. Thornton Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938 for Our Town and is the only writer to win for both fiction and drama.