The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
Summary
On Friday noon, the twentieth of July 1714, the finest rope bridge in Peru breaks and drops five travellers into the gorge below. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan who happens to be watching, is seized by the theological opportunity: here at last is a controlled experiment on Providence. Why these five? He spends six years compiling everything knowable about the dead, and the novel is his casebook, rewritten by a narrator wiser than he is.
The five lives braid into three novellas. The Marquesa de Montemayor, a rich, ridiculous old woman, loves her cold daughter in Spain with a hopeless devotion that has made her letters, the narrator drily notes, immortal Spanish literature; she dies two days after her first honest resolution, with her young companion Pepita beside her. Esteban, one of twin foundlings so close they share a private language, has just lost his brother Manuel and been talked back from suicide when the bridge takes him. And Uncle Pio, impresario, tutor and devotee of the actress Camila Périchole, has finally persuaded her to give him her small son Jaime to educate; the two of them are on the bridge together.
Wilder holds the irony and the tenderness in perfect balance for barely a hundred and twenty pages, and then spends the famous last sentence: there is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Best for readers who want a short, formally perfect novel that asks the largest possible question and has the tact not to answer it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1928 and was the bestselling fiction of 1927, an almost unrepeatable feat for a philosophical novella set in colonial Peru. It made Thornton Wilder famous at thirty.
He is the great multiple threat of American letters: this Pulitzer was followed by two more in drama, for Our Town in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1943, making him the only writer honoured in both categories. The Matchmaker, which became Hello, Dolly!, and the late novel The Eighth Day round out a career of remarkable range.
The Modern Library placed the novella on its century list and Time counted it among the hundred best novels of the century. It has been filmed four times, in 1929, 1944, 1958 and 2004, made into a German opera in 1954 and even a puppet theatre production in 2006, and none of the versions is the equal of the book, which at its length hardly needs adapting so much as reading twice.