WILDER THORNTON Two Autograph Letters Signed to literary cri

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"I WAS A PROTESTANT AND I WAS THOROUGHLY FORMED IN THE PROTESTANT BELIEFS" WILDER, THORNTON. Two Autograph Letters Signed, to literary critic Dalma H. Brunauer. The first, with three holograph corrections in red ink, thanking her for her sympathetic paper on his novel [Bridge of San Luis Rey], and discussing how his Protestant upbringing relates to Bridge. With a 7-line postscript: "It may interest you to know--since you mention Franz Werfel that his widow (and Gustav Mahler's) Alma Mahler-Werfel asked my permission to entitle her (second) book of memoirs: 'Die Brücke ist die Liebe' [And the Bridge is Love, 1958]!!" The second, thanking her for her careful and thoughtful essay [on Bridge], remarking that many are angry that he does not more strongly affirm Christian doctrine, and that she had captured his thinking on the matter admirably: "You have laid out the questions that poor T.N.W. asked . . . ." Together 4 1/2 pages, each small 8vo, the second on personal stationery; folds. Each with the original envelope. (RKM) Hamden, 11 November 1975; 9 Dec[ember] 1974

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9 December 1975: ". . . I have often been reproached for not having made a more explicit declaration of commitment to the Christian faith. If I had had a strict upbringing in the Catholic Church--à la Mauriac or Graham Greene--I would certainly have done so. But I was a Protestant and I was thoroughly formed in the Protestant beliefs--my father's, my school's in Ohio; Oberlin!--and the very . . . exposure to dogmatic Protestant positions make me aware that they were insufficient to encompass the vast picture of history and the burden of suffering in the world. I think that in The Bridge I took flight into the R.C. thought-world in order to avoid asking the same questions. The novel is a novel of questions, remember. And I show that even the R.C. background broke down before those questions. . . .
"I took refuge in Chekhov's statement: it is not the business of writers (of fiction, like himself) to answer the great questions (let the theologians and philosophers do that if they feel they must) but to state the questions correctly!! Which brings us back to Gertrude Stein's dying words: 'What is the answer? What is The Question?' (namely, what is Man on Earth for?) . . ."
with--Willa Cather. Envelope Signed, in the third person in the return address, addressed in her hand to Wilder, with her note, "Please forward." New York, 9 Oct[ober] 1938 [from postmark].