Du Pont Show of the Month: As a "renewer of old treasure," rather than a "maker of new molds," Thornton Wilder found in a one-act play by Prosper Merimee the seed of an idea for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714," he began it, "the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." It posed the intriguing question: Did they die by accident or by divine plan? Its prose was clean and classical, its characters adroitly limned and...
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