“On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.”
Thornton Wilder manages to capture the sublime in one tragic yet undeniably significant moment in his celebrated novella, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Dedicated to his mother, the novel was first published in 1927, between the world wars, and it was Wilder’s first big break as a writer. It rightly won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1928.
Wilder’s short novella explores the lives of five individuals who tragically fall to their deaths while crossing an ancient Incan bridge located on the highroad between Lima and Cuzco on July 20, 1774 in Peru. We are told it is the “finest bridge in all Peru.” The story is told in five short sections, each focusing on the background of the five main characters, and each serving as a eulogy to their lives. Upon learning of the accident, all of Peru becomes obsessed with the mystical significance of this time and place. One man in particular, a red-haired Franciscan from North Italy named Brother Juniper, is a witness to the bridge’s collapse and he spends the remainder of his life trying to unveil the spiritual mystery of the accident. “If there were a plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off.” As a Franciscan friar, he hopes to show the deep interconnectedness of God’s purpose. Why did God choose this moment of death? What is he teaching us about these five people? How do we make sense of this tragedy? Is there any meaning at all? Though he is a man of the cloth, Brother Juniper proceeds empirically, like a social scientist, spending years documenting interviews with people who knew the five victims. He compiles a huge book (in contrast to Wilder’s relatively small novella) which professes to reveal God’s grand plan. Ironically, the Church finds Father Juniper’s book blasphemous. It confiscates the book (Father Juniper’s life work) and commits it to the flame, along with Father Juniper. However, one copy of the book is secretly preserved, though it sits collecting dust, unread at the Library of the University of San Marco. It purportedly claims to show that each person experienced their happiest moment in life just prior to death when the bridge snapped. The bridge serves as a metaphor for human love —“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning (106).”
The key figures examined in detail in the novel are: the life and letters of Dona Marla, Marquesa de Montemayor (and her young female companion named Pepita); the suicidal Esteban who would have sailed around the world with Captain Alvarado had he not died on the bridge; Uncle Pio and a young boy named Don Jaime (the son of Camila Perichole). These are the five characters in the novel who die when the bridge collapses.
In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, there is an element of the ‘found text’ style as we get the sense that we are on the cusp of an important archaeological discovery. As readers of the book, we feel like explorers discovering something sacred and forgotten, like a sealed Egyptian tomb. Each of the five people who died on the bridge are now long forgotten, and Brother Juniper is also forgotten, as well. His death seems to have served no larger purpose, and his life’s work, a book of divine inspiration, lies wholly forgotten and unread. We tend to forget what we do not care to read. After all, there are no heroes or villains in the case of a simple bridge collapsing. There is no one to blame; just five lives lost, and the world continues onward. However, Wilder beckons us to pause from our busy lives and question the meaning of the moment. To what extent do we experience a sacred feeling in this novella? At first, we see the ways people spend their lives, how they lose their lives, and the way others try to make sense of life. Brother Juniper’s life, for example, runs parallel to the lives of the five victims. He was the next person to cross the bridge when it fell, sending those five ahead of him to their deaths. However, Brother Juniper later meets his own death as a result of the incident: he tries to discover its hidden meaning and he is martyred by the church for it. According to the church, the science of God is to remain mysterious, not to be verified or “proven” empirically (despite living in a post-Francis Bacon world). Nevertheless, as audience members to this unique tale, we feel like we are transgressing into some space that is rarefied, deep, mysterious, cosmic, even holy; or in a word, sacred.
Like the fierce madness of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Brother Juniper imputes human reason and human values onto a cold and indifferent natural world. Perhaps a bridge simply snapped killing five people, and that is all the story is able to tell. While the bridge represents different things to different people, we are particularly called upon to consider the spiritual significance of death from the perspective of Brother Juniper.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a brilliant little novel. It is a visionary work of inquiry into the nature of morality, spirituality, life, death, and meaning as either alethea or logos. Notably, unlike other Pulitzer Prize-winners from the 1910s and 1920s, the setting of The Bridge of San Luis Rey takes place far away from the rolling prairies or the booming cities of the United States. Instead, it takes place in a remote part of Peru several centuries ago. The novella is a wholly unique story for this time period. It is a well-deserved in its Pulitzer Prize.
Wilder later noted that the novel poses the question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?” Per the Thorton Wilder Society at Montclair State University in new Jersey, the sources for The Bridge of San Luis Rey included: “…a one-act play [Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement] by [the French playwright] Prosper Mérimée, which takes place in Latin America and one of whose characters is a courtesan. However, the central idea of the work, the justification for a number of human lives that comes up as a result of the sudden collapse of a bridge, stems from friendly arguments with my father, a strict Calvinist. Strict Puritans imagine God all too easily as a petty schoolmaster who minutely weights guilt against merit, and they overlook God’s ‘Caritas’ which is more all-encompassing and powerful. God’s love has to transcend his just retribution. But in my novel I have left this question unanswered. As I said earlier, we can only pose the question correctly and clearly, and have faith one will ask the question in the right way.” He based many of the characters on real people, such as the Perichole and the Viceroy, and while the collapse of the bridge was wholly created by Wilder, it was inspired in part the great Inca road suspension bridge across the Apurímac River, erected around 1350 and still in use in 1864. The name of the bridge was taken from the historic California Mission, Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, which is located in San Diego County, CA.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey has continued to had an enduring cultural influence. Apparently, John Hersey used The Bridge of San Luis Rey as inspiration for his powerful novel Hiroshima, a monumental work of literary journalism which explores the effects of the atomic bomb through the perspectives of five different survivors. Mr. Hersey was also a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner for A Bell for Adano (1944). The Bridge of San Luis Rey was quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in relation to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, as the novel deals with similar questions of random tragedy, and the nature of guilt and innocence in a harsh and unforgiving world.
Notable Quotations:
“The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break… Yet it was rather strange that this event should have so impressed the Limeans, for in that country those catastrophes which lawyers shockingly call the ‘acts of god’ were more than unusually frequent. Tidal waves were continually washing away cities; earthquakes arrived every week and towers fell upon good men and women all the time. Diseases were forever flitting in and out of the provinces and old age carried away some of the most admirable citizens. That is why it was so surprising that the Peruvians should have been especially touched by the rent in the bridge of San Luis Rey” (3-4, Seawolf Press Illustrated Edition).
“It was a very hot noon, that fatal noon, and coming around the shoulder of a hill Brother Juniper stopped to wipe his forehead and to gaze upon the screen of snowy peaks in the distance, then into the gorge below him filled with the dark plumage of green trees and green birds and traversed by its ladder of osier. Joy was in him; things were not going badly. He had opened several little abandoned churches and the Indians were crawling in to an early Mass and groaning at the moment of miracle as though their hearts would break. Perhaps it was the pure air from the snows before him; perhaps it was the memory that brushed him for a moment of poem that bade him raise his eyes to the helpful hills. At all events he felt at peace. Then his glance fell upon the bridge, and at that moment a twanging noise filled the air, as when the string of some musical instrument snaps in a disused room, and he saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below” (4, Seawolf Press Illustrated Edition).
“People were always asking asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes” (5, Seawolf Press Illustrated Edition).
“Some say that we shall ever know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God” (6, Seawolf Press Illustrated Edition).
“What was there in the world more lovely than a beautiful woman doing justice to a Spanish masterpiece?” (77, Seawolf Press Illustrated Edition).
“A new bridge of stone has been built in the place of the old, but the event has not been forgotten. It has passed into proverbial expressions. ‘I may see you Tuesday,’ says a Limean, ‘unless the bridge falls.’ ‘My cousin. lives by the bridge of San Luis Rey,’ says another, and a smile goes around the company, for that also means: under the sword of Damocles” (95, Seawolf Press Illustrated Edition).
“The discrepancy between faith and facts is greater than is generally assumed” (97, Seawolf Press Illustrated Edition).
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning (106, closing lines).”
The 1928 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1928 Pulitzer Novel Jury was composed of the same three men as the prior year: Richard Burton (Chair), Jefferson Fletcher, Robert M. Lovett. They unanimously awarded the prize to Thornton Wilder and the Board quickly approved it, despite Wilder being a largely unknown preparatory schoolteacher in Lawrenceville at the time. In a letter to Frank Fackenthal, Robert M. Lovett identified several other novels for consideration: both Islanders by Helen Hull, and A Yankee Passional by Samuel Ornitz met the criteria for the award despite being of lesser literary merit, and he further suggested a possible compromise with The Grandmothers by Glenway Wescott. Lastly, he mentioned Black April by Julia Peterkin because it “challenges” The Bridge of San Luis Rey in literary merit, “but granting the prize to a novel which presents a rather unedifying picture of life in a primitive negro community would seem to be an ironical answer to the terms on which the prize is offered.” Of course, Julia Peterkin would win a Pulitzer Prize for Scarlet Sister Mary the following year.
Amusingly, after receiving the good news, Thornton Wilder promptly misplaced Frank Fackenthal’s Pulitzer Prize congratulations letter. He wrote to Columbia University, “in pride and happiness at the reception of this honor… I am a preparatory school teacher and in the confusion of examination week and in the sheer pleasure of the news I must have bestowed the letter away so carefully that I cannot find it.” Fackenthal wrote back to Wilder and attached his $1,000 check –and this time Wilder didn’t lose it! The financial award allowed Wilder to continue his writing and his Pulitzer Prize was eventually followed by two more Pulitzers in the drama category: Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.
- Richard Burton (1861-1940) studied at Trinity College and Johns Hopkins. He was a professor at Rollins College for many years. In addition to serving on several Pulitzer Prize Juries in the Novel and Biography categories, he also served on the Book and Drama Leagues of America.
- Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
- Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic, served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.
Per The Pulitzer Prize Archive by Heinz-D and Erika Fischer, other finalists for the prize in 1928 included: Islanders by Helen Hull, A Yankee Passional by Samuel Ornitz, The Grandmothers by Glenway Wescott, and Black April by Julia M. Peterkin (who would win the Pulitzer the following year for Scarlet Sister Mary).
As a result of the Pulitzer Board approving a novel about Peru, the Board again revised the terms of the award, dropping the criteria for the “highest standard of American manners and manhood.” For the following year (in 1929), the Board called for a prize “for the American novel published during the year, preferably one which shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life.”
Who Is Thornton Wilder?
Thornton Niven Wilder (1897-1975) was born in Madison, WI in 1897. He was the son of a prominent newspaperman, who later became a U.S. diplomat and the family moved to Hong Kong. Thornton was a shy child who was frequently teased and mocked in grade school. He attended the Thacher School in Ojai, CA where he started writing amateur plays. He later attended Oberlin College, then graduated from Yale, and received a Master’s Degree from Princeton University. Then, Wilder pursued a career as a teacher of French and literature before he started writing novels.
He was a shy, quiet man but nevertheless he maintained an incredible zest for life. He traveled widely and befriended many people all over the world, from truck drivers and bartenders to prominent intellectuals like Sigmund Freud and Robert Maynard Hutchins. In Europe, he rubbed shoulders with George Bernard Shaw, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and back in the States, he found himself among the ranks of William Faulkner. Wilder first received commercial success with his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1927, a book which reviewers praised as a “little masterpiece” and an extraordinary bestseller. He later won the Pulitzer Prize again, albeit in the Drama category, for his brilliant and inspiring play Our Town in 1928 and then again for The Skin of Our Teeth in 1943 (in total, he won three Pulitzers). He also won the National Book Award for his entire body of work (which came with a $5,000 award). He led a storied life, serving in the army in Italy and North Africa, and later teaching at Harvard University. He dabbled in Hollywood by helping write the first draft of the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. He never married, always claiming to be too busy in his youth for marriage, however more recent speculation suggests Wilder may have privately been gay. He was featured on the cover of Time Magazine on January 12, 1955.
With the proceeds from The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder built a house for his family in Hamden, Connecticut (for his sisters and himself) though he was frequently abroad traveling. He died of heart failure at his home in 1975. Upon his death he was praised by fellow playwrights, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in a tribute in The New York Times. In its 1975 obituary of Thornton Wilder, The New York Times published the following: “Although Mr. Wilder was essentially a metaphysician, his novels (and his plays) were infused with a sense of wit and humor… Mr. Wilder believed that ‘literature is the orchestration of platitudes,’ and that its function was not to reveal new truths so much as to trigger those that lie with everyone.”
Film Adaptations:
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929)
- Director: Charles Brabin
- Starring: Lili Damita, Duncan Renaldo, Raquel Torres
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944)
- Director: Rowland V. Lee
- Starring: Lynn Bari, Akim Tamiroff, Francis Lederer, Nazimova, Louis Calhern, Blanche YurkaDonald Woods
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004)
- Director: Mary McGuckian
- Starring: Robert De Niro, Kathy Bates, Gabriel Byrne, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Geraldine Chaplin
The Bridge of San Luis Rey was also broadcast as part of CBS’s “DuPont Show of the Month” in 1958.
Further Reading:
- Our Town (1938)
- Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
- The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)
- Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
- Ides of March (1948)
- A novel about the waning days of the Roman Republic and the assassination of Julius Caesar.
- The Eighth Day (1967)
- Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
Literary Context in 1927-1928:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1927): awarded to French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.”
- Gertrude Stein was honored by the Académie des femmes, an informal gathering for woman writers, founded by the expatriate American Natalie Clifford Barney.
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf was published.
- T. S. Eliot was baptized into the Church of England at Finstock (previously he was Unitarian) and he officially took his British citizenship test. Eliot’s poem Journey of the Magi was published during this year.
- James Joyce’s collection Pomes Penyeach was published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
- Eric Blair (a.k.a. George Orwell) decided while on leave from the Imperial Police in Burma to remain in the U.K. He moved to London to become a writer.
- Agatha Christie’s fictional amateur detective Miss Marple was first published in “The Tuesday Night Club”, published in The Royal Magazine. Also published durign this year was The Big Four.
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather was published.
- The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle was published.
- Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway was published.
- Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse was published.
- Amerika by Franz Kafka was published.
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven was published.
- Oil! by Upton Sinclair was published.
- Le Temps retrouvé, or “Time Regained” or “The Past Recaptured” which was final installment of In Search of Lost Time, was posthumously published by Marcel Proust.
- John Thomas and Lady Jane by D. H. Lawrence was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is one of my favorite novels among the early Pulitzer Prize-winners. As a great admirer of Thornton Wilder and his deep, metaphysical examinations of modern life as featured in both The Bridge of San Luis Rey and also Our Town (I have yet to read or see a performance of his other Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth), I think his three Pulitzer Prize wins are well-deserved.
Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, April 15, 2003.