From his early years in the old world of peace and security, Ernest Poole has watched the great social forces here and abroad that have brought us over the Bridge of time into today’s world of chaos and crisis. He is one of those rare men who have seen a great deal and been able to dramatize it; and he understood why things have happened. His book is packed with little stories, each one pointing to the larger events which were to come.
His boyhood in Chicago in the nineties was full of lively incidents. After graduating from Princeton, then a college of a mere twelve hundred students, Ernest Poole went to live in New York on the lower East Side in the days when that was the melting pot. There he wrote stories of people and incidents that were part of his daily life. With his visit to Russia in 1905, the Bridge crosses into a world where he saw at first hand the early stirrings of revolution.
Back in New York, Mr. Poole tells of writers he knew (Mark Twain, O. Henry, and others), of playwriting, the radical movement, and the writing of The Harbor. The year 1914 found him in Berlin and in the front-line German trenches doing articles for magazines in the United States, this country being still neutral. He visited Russia again in the first stages of the revolution, when many new political factions were giving rise to fresh discontent and the power of the Bolsheviki was growing day by day; by way of Siberia he returned to the United States and to Washington. The rest of the story tells of Wall Street in the mad twenties, the New Deal, life in fascist Italy, and life the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
The Bridge is both an epic of vast social changes and the personal story of one who has felt and thought and grown in pace with the trends of his era. An index to full-names, places and subjects adds the value of this work.