question: In what year did Thornton Wilder write his three-act play that would later be compared to Neil Young's Greendale?
answer: 1938
context: Title: Greendale (album)
  Passage: Greendale is the twenty-sixth studio album by Neil Young.  Young and Crazy Horse's "Greendale", a 10-song rock opera, is set in a fictional California seaside town.  Based on the saga of the Green family, the "audio novel" has been compared to the literary classics of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" and Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" for its complexity and emotional depth in exploring a small town in America.
  Title: The Merchant of Yonkers
  Passage: The Merchant of Yonkers is a play by Thornton Wilder.  The play had its origins in an 1835 one-act farce by the English dramatist John Oxenford.  Oxenford's work, "A Day Well Spent", was later extended into a full-length play entitled "Einen Jux will er sich machen" ("He Will Go on a Spree" or "He'll Have Himself a Good Time") by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy in 1842.  Wilder adapted Nestroy's version into an Americanized comedy entitled "The Merchant of Yonkers", which revolves around Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy Yonkers, New York businessman in the market for a wife.
  Title: Our Town
  Passage: Our Town is a 1938 metatheatrical three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder.  It tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens.
citations: Our Town Greendale (album)