The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever it was unthinkable that it should break. The novel begins precisely at noon on July 20, 1714, when a bridge on the Royal Road between Lima and Cuzco, the finest bridge in all Peru, inexplicably collapses, and five people who happen at that moment to be crossing the bridge plummet to their deaths. It is the question that defines us as human beings. One merely has to consider the central question raised by the novel, which, according to Wilder himself, was simply: Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will? It is perhaps the largest and most profoundly personal philosophical inquiry that we can undertake. When we read the novel today, we nod in admiration, and we wonder at its uncanny ability to describe ourselves to ourselves in terms that are both essential to our species and particular to our times. Written near the end of the Roaring Twenties by a man barely out of his own twenties, it nonetheless feels, in its exquisite universality and ease of timeless application, ancient, classical, almost biblical. Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey is as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature. Ultimately, his search leads to a timeless investigation into the nature of fate and love, and the meaning of the human condition. Deeply moved, he embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention, not chance, that led to the deaths of the five people crossing the bridge that day. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." This immortal sentence opens The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American literature, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a novel still read throughout the world.īrother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, witnesses the tragic event.
Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey is of this kind." -The Independent (London)
"There are books that haunt you down the years, books that seem to touch and stir something deep inside you. "As close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature." -Russell Banks The definitive edition of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic with a foreword by acclaimed author Russell Banks and an afterword by Wilder's nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating documentary material about the novel and its rich literary history.
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