The Bridge of San Luis Rey
- Written By Thorton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
- Thorton Wilder
A bridge breaks. Five lives end. One friar asks why.
On a bright July midday in 1714, the oldest bridge in Peru snaps over a gorge outside Lima, dropping five travelers into the ravine below. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan who watches it happen, sees a rare opportunity: proof, gathered fact by fact, that God’s hand guides even catastrophe. He resolves to reconstruct everything he can about the five who fell, certain their deaths will reveal a pattern that only faith could design.
What he finds instead are five human lives, each built around a love that never quite landed where it was aimed. The Marquesa de Montemayor, aging and unloved by the daughter she adores, pours herself into letters no one asked for. Her young companion, Pepita, discovers a courage she never knew she had. The orphaned twins, Esteban and Manuel, are bound so completely to each other that any other love threatens to split them apart. Uncle Pio has spent years shaping a street singer into a great actress, and now watches her outgrow him. Brother Juniper interviews, measures, cross-references — and the closer he gets to certainty, the further the truth slips from his grasp.
Wilder’s compact, luminous novel became one of the most widely read American books of the 20th century, its closing lines quoted at funerals more often than almost any other work of fiction in the English language. The novel’s answer to its own question of accident and design is love itself, rendered with enough precision to survive intact.
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
About the Author
- Thorton Wilder
Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, the son of a newspaper editor and diplomat whose professional postings brought the family to China before Wilder finished growing up. He studied at Oberlin and Yale, then took a graduate degree at Princeton, teaching French at a New Jersey boarding school while writing his first novels on the side. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, published in 1927, made him famous almost overnight and won him the Pulitzer Prize for the novel the following year.
He would win two more Pulitzers for his plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, becoming the only writer to take the prize in both fiction and drama. He taught at the University of Chicago through the 1930s, served in military intelligence during the Second World War, and later adapted a minor farce into what would become the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly!
Wilder died in 1975, having spent much of his life in Hamden, Connecticut, working across a wide range of genres, including novels and dramas. The Bridge of San Luis Rey remains his most widely read book, translated into dozens of languages and still assigned in classrooms today, a lasting demonstration of the book’s foundational claim: that a life is measured in the love it gives.
