The Bridge of San Luis Rey

At noon on Friday, the 20th of July, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. Brother Juniper was there, and saw it, and he spent the next six years investigating the lives of those five people to find out why they, specifically, were on that bridge at that moment — whether their deaths were divine plan or pure accident.

Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1928, making it one of the most acclaimed American novels of the 20th century’s first half. At 128 pages it is less a novel than a sustained meditation — five separate portraits of people defined by love (for a son, for a woman, for a god, for a twin brother) who happen to die together, and the question of what, if anything, connects them beyond the coincidence of a bridge.

The Peru of the novel is colonial Lima — the world of the Viceroy’s court, the Archbishop, the Marquesa de Montemayor writing letters to her indifferent daughter in Spain, the theatre where the actress Camila Perichole performs for the Viceroy’s amusement. It is not a tourist’s Peru or a backpacker’s Peru, but an 18th-century aristocratic world that most contemporary readers know only from this novel.

The bridge itself is the bridge of the Apurímac River, on the road from Lima to Cusco — the route that connected colonial Peru’s capital to the Inca heartland. Wilder imagined a woven grass rope bridge of the kind that Andean engineering had developed to extraordinary sophistication before the Spanish conquest. For anyone visiting the Inca trails of Peru, the novel is a reminder that the landscape was inhabited, and imagined, long before tourism arrived.

Brother Juniper’s Question

Brother Juniper’s investigation — six years of research into the lives of the five victims — is organized around the question of whether the bridge collapse was divine plan or pure accident. He believes that if he can find a common pattern in the lives of those who died, a moral logic to their simultaneous deaths, he will have found evidence of Providence — proof that God’s hand shapes human events, that the universe is not random. The investigation is, in other words, an act of faith seeking confirmation through evidence.

What Wilder does with this premise is subtle. Brother Juniper finds patterns — each of the five was at a turning point, each was defined by a central love, each had something to finish or leave behind. But the patterns do not add up to a proof. The same facts that suggest providential selection could equally suggest coincidence. Brother Juniper’s conclusion satisfies him; whether it should satisfy the reader is a question Wilder leaves deliberately open. The Inquisition burns Brother Juniper and his book for heresy — not because his conclusion was wrong but because the attempt to verify Providence through evidence was itself presumptuous.

The Five Lives

The novel’s five portraits are individually the work of a writer at full stretch. The Marquesa de Montemayor, whose obsessive love for her indifferent daughter in Spain has made her a writer of extraordinary letters and a figure of local comedy in Lima, is perhaps the most fully realised. Uncle Pio, the theatre impresario and mentor of the actress Camila Perichole, who loves her with a devotion that is entirely undemanding and therefore invisible. The twins Manuel and Esteban, whose bond is so complete that when Manuel falls in love with Camila, the disruption to their relationship is a kind of catastrophe. Each portrait is complete in itself and illuminates the others.

The emotional argument of the novel — if argument is the right word — is that love, in whatever form it takes and however unsuccessful it proves, is the thing that makes a human life cohere. The five who die on the bridge were all, in their different ways, people for whom love was the central fact of existence. Whether this similarity is Providence or coincidence is the question the novel refuses to answer. What it does assert, quietly, is that the love was real, and that it mattered, and that it deserves to be remembered.

Pulitzer Prize and Legacy

The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 and made Wilder, then thirty, internationally famous. It has never gone out of print. Its influence on subsequent fiction — the use of catastrophe as a device for examining multiple lives simultaneously, the integration of philosophical inquiry into narrative form — has been substantial. Wilder was the only writer to win the Pulitzer for both fiction and drama (twice: Our Town in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1943), a distinction no other writer has matched.

The Novel as Meditation

What distinguishes The Bridge of San Luis Rey from a conventional historical novel, or from a conventional philosophical novel, is that it refuses to separate its historical texture from its philosophical inquiry. The colonial Lima it renders is not a backdrop but the substance of the question: the specific lives of these five people, in this specific time and place, are what Brother Juniper is investigating, and their specificity is what gives the novel its emotional power. A more abstract treatment of Providence and accident would be philosophy; it is the Marquesa’s letters, Uncle Pio’s devotion, the twins’ inseparable bond that make it literature. This is the lesson Wilder teaches through the novel’s form as well as its content: that the universal is found in the particular, and nowhere else.

Reading Guides

• Thornton Wilder Books in Order
• Where to Start with Thornton Wilder
• Books About Peru: Essential Reading for Visitors to the Andes
• Best Literary Fiction of All Time