The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder

Jan 2023 · B.J. Harrison · Narrated by B.J. Harrison

About this audiobook

Five people fall to their deaths when a bridge collapses over a river in Peru. Can Brother Juniper discover the reason that these five individuals had to die?

Exploring themes of love, goodness, and predestination, Wilder exposes the nature of his characters by examining their relationships. The bonds of parents and children, siblings, and surrogate parents are all examined with elegant skill, leading us to ask the hard questions that point to the inevitable river below.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1928.

About the author

One of the most honored and versatile of modern writers, Thornton Wilder combined a career as a successful novelist with work for the theater that made him one of this century's outstanding dramatists. It was an early short novel, however, that first brought him fame. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), a bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927, is the story of a group of assorted people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses. Ingeniously constructed and rich in its philosophical implications about fate and synchronicity, Wilder's book would seem to be the first well-known example of a formula that has become a cliche in popular literature. His attraction to classical themes is manifested in The Woman of Andros (1930), a tragedy about young love in pre-Christian Greece, and The Ides of March (1948), set in the time of Julius Caesar and told in letters and documents covering a long span of years. Heaven's My Destination (1934), is a seriocomic and picaresque story about a young book salesman traveling through the Midwest during the early years of the Great Depression.Theophilus North (1973), Wilder's last novel, disappointed many reviewers, but it provided its author with opportunities to offer some wry observations on the life of the idle rich in Newport during the summer of 1926 and to ponder in the story of his alter ego what might have happened if Wilder had stayed home, so to speak, instead of becoming Thornton Wilder. As a serious writer of fiction, Wilder's main claim rests on The Eighth Day (1967), an intellectual thriller, which the N.Y. Times called "the most substantial fiction of his career." It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1968.