Read With Us

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder

The following text is excerpted from the Big Read's Reader's Guide on The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town, reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and his stage drama Our Town (1938) have enjoyed enormous success since the moment they first appeared. Both won Pulitzer Prizes, and neither has ever been out of print. Because they have been widely read or performed abroad, this novel and play are not only American classics but classics of world literature as well. They are so well known, in fact, that we easily take them for granted. Whether you are rediscovering Wilder’s work or entering his world for the first time, you are joining thousands of his readers in exploring the fundamental meaning of human existence.

At first glance, these two stories may appear to be worlds apart. Our Town is set between 1901 and 1913 in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a community that has produced nobody very “important.” Wilder wrote that his subject was “the trivial details of human life in reference to a vast perspective of time, of social history and of religious ideas.” He was, he told us in an early preface to the play, presenting “the life of a village against the life of the stars.”

As Emily and others reflect on the meaning of their lives in their town, we may see our own experiences more clearly, wherever we live.

There is nothing ordinary about the backdrop of Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or the characters in his story. The novel is set in Lima, Peru, in the golden age of the eighteenth-century Spanish colonial empire. Among the exotic cast of characters are the greatest actress of the age, a drunken Marquesa who can’t stop writing letters, an obsessed Harlequin named Uncle Pio, identical twins with a private language, and a legendary ship captain. Nor does the novel lack drama, starting with the very first sentence: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.”

As different as these two works are in form and setting, they pose the same enduring questions that Wilder explored throughout his writing career—often employing death as the window to life. He could well have written of The Bridge of San Luis Rey as he wrote of Our Town: “It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life.”

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

On a summer day in 1714, a bridge collapses in Peru, plunging five unsuspecting travelers to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a witness to the tragedy, dedicates himself to discovering why those five perished. Juniper’s work is judged heretical by the Inquisition and he and his findings are burned at the stake, but a secret copy survives. The narrator of The Bridge delves deeper into the lives of the victims: “Some say . . . that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

Thornton Wilder’s second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) had diverse inspirations. The book’s philosophical underpinnings are rooted in Wilder’s conversations with his father, a devoted churchman, and in a passage in the gospel of Luke that reads, “… those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?” Wilder often said that it is not the responsibility of a writer to answer a question but rather “to pose the question correctly and clearly.” Wilder later said, “The Bridge asked the question whether the intention that lies behind love was sufficient to justify the desperation of living.”

The action of the story has its origins in Wilder’s extensive reading of French literature, including the letters of Marquise de Sévigné and a short comic play by Prosper Mérimée, Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement, about a notorious affair between the Viceroy of Peru and a famous actress called La Perichole.

Wilder began the novel in July 1926 during a residency at the MacDowell Colony, a writer’s retreat in New Hampshire, and just a year later the book was heralded by critics as a “masterpiece” and a “triumph.” The public agreed. The book sold out almost immediately. By the time it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, it had already been through seventeen printings and had sold nearly 300,000 copies.

The success of The Bridge allowed Wilder to resign his position at the Lawrenceville School to write and lecture full time. He used his royalties to build a home in Hamden, Connecticut, known as “The House The Bridge Built,” where he lived with his parents and sister Isabel.

Today, The Bridge remains a perennial favorite. Wilder’s novel continues to hold meaning for people the world over. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, British Prime Minister Tony Blair read from The Bridge’s closing lines at a memorial service for British victims of the World Trade Center attack: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

This text is excerpted from the Big Read's Reader's Guide on The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town reprinted courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Foundation at MCCC is one of 267 organizations nationwide selected to participate in The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Library and Museum Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest.

The Big Read is designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. It aims to address the crisis of rapidly declining literary reading in America by providing citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities. Through innovative reading programs, educational programming and comprehensive resources for discussing classic literature, The Big Read encourages reading for pleasure and enlightenment.

The Big Read of Monroe County provides citizens in Monroe County with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The program is designed to revitalize the role of literature in the nation's popular culture, and to bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of all citizens.

Monroe County Community College, the Monroe County Library System, and other community partners are sponsoring county-wide Big Read programs and activities from March 26 through April 26, 2010 promoting reading and discussion of The Bridge of San Luis Rey.