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The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Introduction

The Bridge of San Luis Rey was Thornton Wilder's second novel, published when he was just thirty, and it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. It tells the story of a religious man's spiritual quest to determine why God allows disasters to occur. Wilder sets the action in Lima, Peru, in 1714, where a Franciscan monk witnesses the collapse of a bridge that has stood for over a century, killing the five people on it. The priest becomes determined to develop a scientific method for calculating what personality characteristics the five might have shared that would make God ready to call them to him. In the novel, Brother Juniper spends years compiling data about each victim in order to draw his conclusions. Wilder fits their personal stories into a slender volume, told with a voice that resonates across years and cultures.

Thornton Wilder
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Almost since its first publication, The Bridge of San Luis Rey has been recognized as a literary masterpiece. Its unique mixture of the spiritual with the humane has given readers throughout the decades a point of reference when considering the apparent horrors that can occur in a world that is explained increasingly through cold scientific eyes. In his memorial tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, British prime minister Tony Blair quoted from the book, and since then it has become even more popular, as the world has struggled to reconcile faith with catastrophe.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey Summary

Part One: Perhaps an Accident

The first few pages of the first chapter of The Bridge of San Luis Rey explain the book's basic premise: this story centers on an event that happened in Lima, Peru, at noon of Friday, June 12, 1714. A bridge woven by the Incas a century earlier collapsed at that particular moment, while five people were crossing it. The collapse was witnessed by Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk who was on his way to cross it. Curious about why God would allow such a tragedy, he decides to take a scientific approach to the question. He sets out to interview everyone he can find who knew the five victims. Over the course of six years, he compiles a huge book. Part One foretells the burning of the book that occurs at the end of the novel, but it also says that one copy of Brother Juniper's book survives and is at the library of the University of San Marco, where it sits neglected.

Part Two: The Marquesa de Montemayor

The second section focuses on one of the victims of the collapse: Doña María, the Marquesa de Montemayor. She was the daughter of a cloth merchant, an ugly child who eventually entered into an arranged marriage and bore a daughter, Clara, whom she loved dearly. Clara was indifferent to her mother, though, and married a Spanish man and moved across the ocean. Doña María visits her daughter, but when they cannot get along, she returns to Lima. The only way that they can communicate comfortably is by letter, and Doña María pours her heart into her writing, which becomes so polished that her letters will be read in schools for hundreds of years after her death.

Doña María takes as her companion Pepita, a girl raised at the Convent of Santa María Rosa de la Rosas. When she learns that her daughter in Spain is pregnant, Doña María decides to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of SantaMaría de Cluxambuqua. Pepita goes along as company and to supervise the staff. When DoñaMaría is out at the shrine, Pepita stays at the inn and writes a letter to her patron, the Abbess, complaining about her misery and loneliness. DoñaMaría sees the letter on the table when she gets back and reads it. Later, she asks Pepita about the letter, and Pepita says she burned it because it was not brave to write it. DoñaMaría has new insight into the ways in which her own life has lacked bravery, but the next morning, returning to Lima, she and Pepita are on the bridge... » Complete The Bridge of San Luis Rey Summary