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By Root 1144 0

with her back against a post; the sick lay in rows gazing at the ceiling and trying to hold their breaths. She talked that night of all those out in the dark (she was thinking of Esteban alone, she was thinking of Pepita alone) who had no one to turn to, for whom the world perhaps was more than difficult, without meaning. And those who lay in their beds there felt that they were within a wall that the Abbess had built for them; within all was light and warmth, and without was the darkness they would not exchange even for a relief from pain and from dying. But even while she was talking, other thoughts were passing in the back of her mind. "Even now," she thought, "almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

THE END.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THORNTON WILDER was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin. At the time, his father was editor of the Wisconsin State Journal but in 1906 was appointed United States Consul-General at Hong Kong, a post he held for three years before being assigned to Shanghai. Having thus received some of his early schooling in China, young Thornton prepared for college in California, attended Oberlin College from 1915 to 1917, and then transferred to Yale. After World War I broke out, he interrupted his studies to serve as a corporal in the Coast Artillery at Narragansett Bay in 1918. Returning to college after the Armistice, Wilder graduated from Yale in 1920. William Lyon Phelps wrote of him: "As an undergraduate he was unusually versatile, original and clever. He played and composed music, wrote much prose and verse, and stood well in the studies of the course." Upon leaving Yale, Wilder did a year of archeological study at the American Academy of Classical Studies in Rome. From 1921 to 1928 he taught French at Lawrenceville Academy. During this period he continued his graduate work, receiving his master's degree from Princeton in 1926. All the while, Wilder had been writing on the side, experimenting with narrative style and technique, determined to write for pleasure, not for profit. When his first novel,The Cabala, appeared in 1926, many critics praised the graceful and distinguished literary style; however, his short tale of the decay of a group of sophisticates in Rome was too remote for the work to have general appeal. Also that year, the American Laboratory Theatre produced his first play,The Trumpet Shall Sound. Then, in 1927,The Bridge of San Luis Rey was accepted for publication. According to one story, the book was published solely because the publishers thought that so fine a work ought to be printed; they had little expectation of its success with the public. But the public was enthusiastic--the book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928--and each year thousands of new readers acclaim Wilder's story of the five who perished on a fragile bridge.The Bridge of San Luis Rey contains no furious action. It is short on violence and does not capitalize on an exotic setting. Yet the appeal of the book is universal; like Brother Juniper, all people everywhere sooner or later are challenged by the proposition, "Either we live by accident and die by accident or we live by plan and die by plan." Although it was never Wilder's aim nor Brother Juniper's fortune to discover an answer, there is in his novel a pattern of meaning to the passions and errors and longings of human beings. The meaning is ahuman one, for although we can never be totally assured of Divine Intervention in our every movement on earth, the "bridge" of love that connects one to another gives dignity and purpose to even the lowliest of lives. During the next ten years Thornton