Mrs. Bridge

Published in 1959, Mrs. Bridge is a quiet masterpiece of mid-twentieth-century fiction, and this edition celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. A novel of the American heart-land, it takes up familiar themes, set in a comfortable middle-class Midwestern family in the decades before World War II. At the same time, it is experimental in form, a work that unobtrusively advances the art of the novel.

The book includes 68 photographs, half duo-tone and half color, by Laurie Simmons. Simmons is a leading American artist who uses photography to explore the role of women in the domestic sphere. Beginning in the mid-1970s when she took photographs for a toy company catalog, Simmons has been fascinated with the artifacts of the household. During the remaining years of that decade she used dolls and doll house walls, furniture, and fixtures to make set-ups for photographs. These works established her as one of the most important artists in photography in the United States. The images in this book were selected from that series.

Evan Connell (1924-2013) has long been considered the overlooked master of the American novel, with Mrs. Bridge and its companion volume, Mr. Bridge, published in 1969, among the notable achievements of his early career. These apparently straight-forward accounts of an uneventful marriage, told from the wife’s and then the husband’s perspective, are breathtaking in their psychological acuity, social insight, wit, and compassion.

The reputation of Evan Connell has been a puzzle to his legions of admirers, who have ranged from Dorothy Parker to Paul Newman. A writer of unmistakable talent and dedication who has published twenty books, he is nevertheless absent from the literary pantheon of his generation. As Mark Oppenheimer explains in the introduction to the Arion Press edition: “The three decades after World War II were the time of the American Jewish writer…. With a tide of praise for Jewish writers, there was less water to buoy up their Gentile peers. One last bit of unfinished business, then, is to recognize Connell, a chronicler of American Protestant suffering, whose masterpiece, Mrs. Bridge, was published in 1959. That was the year of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. It is not hard to see why Mrs. Bridge was overlooked. But it is time to make amends.”

Opperheimer adds, “I can’t think of another novel in which a male author describes so generously an older woman; what has roused the author’s compassion is not a sister figure, or a daughter, but a mother. And we sympathize in equal measure with the impatient children and their mom, whom the children know could be so much more, and whose limitations they hope they have not inherited.”

For thirty-five years, Connell’s career was associated with San Francisco, where he was a founder of the literary magazine Contact. Prior to the commercial success of his 1984 best-seller on General Custer, Son of the Morning Star, Connell held a day job as an interviewer in the municipal unemployment office. His Bridge novels were the basis of a 1990 film, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, starring his fans Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Beginning in1989, Connell lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico.