WORKS

Featured Work:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

Thornton Wilder's second novel, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, was published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. The plot is deceptively simple: On July 20, 1714, "the finest bridge in all Peru" collapses and five people die. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, happens to witness the tragedy, and as a result, he asks the central question of the novel: "Why did this happen to those five?" He sets out to explore the lives of the five victims, and to understand why they died. Ironically, his quest will lead to his own death.

In later years, when someone asked Thornton Wilder about his purpose in writing THE BRIDGE, he replied that he was posing a question: "Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?"

Wilder populated his novel with an interesting cast of characters. The Marquesa de Montemayor, dies when the bridge falls, as does her maid, Pepita. As an awkward, homely young woman, the Marquesa was forced into an arranged marriage. At the time of her death, she is estranged from the person she loves most in the world, her daughter Clara. The Marquesa writes her daughter voluminous letters. The lonely Marquesa's companion at home and on the doomed bridge is Pepita, an orphan who was reared by the Abbess Madre Maria del Maria, one of the great women of Peru.

The Abbess has also watched over the orphaned twins Esteban and Manuel. Esteban, who is thrown to his death when the bridge goes down, has been in such despair over Manuel's recent death that he has contemplated suicide. It is because he has decided to "push on" and to go to sea that he is on the bridge at the exact moment of its collapse. [It is interesting to remember that Thornton Wilder had a twin brother who died at birth.]

Uncle Pio has devoted much of his life to Camila Perichole, the most celebrated actress in Peru, if not in all of the Spanish world. According to the Marquesa, Pio was an "aged Harlequin." In addition to guiding the Perichole's career, he has been an adventurer, a linguist, a teacher, and an expert on Spanish literature, especially the literature of the theater. He is traveling on the bridge that fateful day with the Perichole's little son Jaime because he is going to spend a year educating the boy.

Describing the sources of his novel, Wilder explained that the plot was inspired "in its external action by a one-act play by [the French playwright] Prosper Merimee, which takes place in Latin America and one of whose characters is a courtesan. However, the central idea of the work, the justification for a number of human lives that comes up as a result of the sudden collapse of a bridge, stems from friendly arguments with my father, a strict Calvinist. Strict Puritans imagine God all too easily as a petty schoolmaster who minutely weights guilt against merit, and they overlook God's Caritas' which is more all- encompassing and powerful. God's love has to transcend his just retribution. But in my novel I have left this question unanswered. As I said earlier, we can only pose the question' correctly and clearly, and have faith one will ask the question in the right way."

When asked if his characters were historical or imagined, Wilder replied, "The Perichole and the Viceroy are real people, under the names they had in history. Most of the events were invented by me, including the fall of the bridge." He based the Marquesa's habit of writing letters to her daughter on his knowledge of the great French letter-writer, Madame de Sevigne.

THE BRIDGE received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was translated into many languages, and established Wilder's reputation in "the front rank of living novelists."