ows loss or what remains enduring after time or an era has passed. It is about memory and what it clings to or holds on to despite all that inevitably, inexorably changes. It is about how new work always follows in the steps of the old toward the future, about influence and inspiration, whatever the source. And so, as the fourth in a tetralogy of "final" books beginning with A Last Hike In, After also reflects, in its own way of understanding them, upon the four last and lasting things.

Peter Weltner grew up in suburban New Jersey, in Piedmont, North Carolina, and, as a wanderer in and explorer of the city, in Manhattan during its cultural glory years of the later fifties and early sixties. He received his A.B. from Hamilton College in 1964 and his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1970. Since 1969, he has lived in San Francisco, where he taught literature at San Francisco State for 37 years. On July 4th, 1986, he met Atticus Carr at a picnic in Golden Gate Park four blocks from where they now live in their home by Ocean Beach. He has published numerous books of poetry, two novels, one collection of three short novels, and four collections of stories, two of which won O. Henry prizes.