A Study Guide for Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535835527

Book preview

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The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder

1927

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.

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.

Despite Faulkner's roots in the South, he readily condemns many aspects of its history and heritage in Absalom, Absalom!. He reveals the unsavory side of southern morals and ethics, including slavery. The novel explores the relationship between modern humanity and the past, examining how past events affect modern decisions and to what extent modern people are responsible for the past.

Author Biography

Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, along with a twin brother who did not survive childbirth. His father was a newspaper editor who joined the Foreign Service, eventually being named as the U.S. consul to Hong Kong in 1906. Wilder lived briefly in Hong Kong, returned to the United States, then went back to the Far East in 1911 when his father was reassigned to Shanghai. He returned to California once more. He attended an exclusive boarding school in Ojai, which he found to be a miserable experience, feeling isolated and being treated as an outcast for being a homosexual. Throughout his life, the isolation he felt during his high school days persisted. He returned home to attend school in Berkeley for