Puente A Terabithia

THE GLENCOE LITERATURE LIBRARY

Study Guide
for

Bridge to Terabithia
by Katherine Paterson

i

Meet Katherine Paterson
‘seeking whom they might devour.’” Paterson “could spot them coming across the entire width of the school grounds and would be reduced to jelly on the spot.” At the same school, she worked as a library aide and became an avid reader. “I do not think it would be [toomuch] to say that [the school library] saved my sanity,” she adds. After finishing college, Paterson taught school for a year in a small town similar to Lark Creek in Bridge to Terabithia. She then spent four years in Japan as a missionary. Returning to the United States in 1962, she married John Paterson, a Presbyterian minister. The couple has four children. Before Paterson became a full-timewriter of fiction, she wrote educational materials. In her spare time, she began writing historical fiction set in Japan. Her first great success was winning the National Book Award for The Master Puppeteer, a mystery about a boy’s success in a traditional Japanese art. Bridge to Terabithia, Paterson’s first book set outside Japan, won the Newbery Medal in 1978. Three years later, she won anotherNewbery Medal for Jacob Have I Loved, a bittersweet story about twin sisters. She also won the National Book Award a second time for The Great Gilly Hopkins, the story of a wisecracking foster child. Paterson continues to write fiction for young people and is recognized for her understanding of how children cope with difficult situations. She now lives in Vermont, where she enjoys sailing, swimming,and playing tennis. Not surprisingly, her favorite hobby is reading. She describes her attitude toward life and writing in this way:
I see myself as a tiny speck in a vast and marvelous universe, in which every particle is . . . connected, and in which nothing happens to any part that does not affect the whole. . . . Telling stories is what I do, so I try to do it as well as I can.
9

Whenpeople ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was, better still, a weird little kid, and . . . there are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.
—Katherine Paterson

atherine Paterson was born in 1932 in China, where her parents were American missionaries. Her first languagewas Chinese. Because of wars, the family was forced to move from China twice. The second time, Katherine and her family returned to the United States, where they moved frequently, owing to her father’s new assignments. When she first entered school, Katherine knew little about the United States and spoke English with a British accent. Before she graduated from high school, she had attended morethan a dozen different schools. Paterson sees her choice of characters— children who are different from their schoolmates—as a reflection of her own childhood experience of having been an outsider in different cultures and frequently the new kid in school. She especially remembers her experiences in a North Carolina elementary school, where “Pansy and her gang of seventh-grade Amazons . . . used toroam the playground,
Bridge to Terabithia Study Guide

K

Copyright © by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Introducing the Novel
[W]hen I set out to write I guess my conscious thing is not that I’m going to teach a message but that I’m going to tell a true story, and then I will trust the reader to learn from it whatever he or she wants to or is able to.
—Katherine Paterson

Have youever dreamed about leaving your problems and cares behind and escaping to a world where everything is just the way you want it? If you are like most people, you have probably dreamed about an imaginary world. Maybe you have even created one, with the help of your family or friends. Katherine Paterson’s award-winning novel Bridge to Terabithia is about an imaginary world. The kingdom of Terabithia...