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3.5 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

By Thornton Wilder & Tappan Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder & Tappan Wilder digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The authorized, original 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.

"As close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature." —Russell Banks

"There are books that haunt you down the years, books that seem to touch and stir something deep inside you. . . . Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey is of this kind." —The Independent (London)

"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.

Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, witnesses the tragic event. 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. Ultimately, his search leads to a timeless investigation into the nature of fate and love, and the meaning of the human condition.

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91 Reviews

3.5
“Some beautiful writing throughout this short novel. I had a problem with the premise though. Brother Juniper had a theological hypothesis he wanted to prove that everything is part of a master plan by god. To do this he researched the lives of the five victims who fell from the bridge. Hence we learn a great deal about these people. But nowhere does Brother Juniper explore this topic. Instead we leave with the note of how the living and the dead are connected via a bridge of love.”

About Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of his seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly! Wilder also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, opera, and film, including his classic screenplay for Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). The writer’s many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.

Tappan Wilder

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