With painstaking detail, Brother Juniper amasses copious amounts of information about the people who died and their relationships with people who were close to them. His investigation into their lives determines their value to society. Upon seeing the collapse of the bridge he realizes that he now has experimental subjects-the people who died-and also a control group subjects in those who did not die. It also examines what becomes of their friends and the relatives they left behind.īrother Juniper’s primary goal was to prove his hypothesis that theology is a science like any other, and thus could be supported by material from the actual lives of people and not just be fully attributed to faith. At this point, the narrative turns to the personal backgrounds and histories of the five victims. The failure of the bridge in 1714 comes as a surprise to everyone in Lima, the capital city, since although the bridge was made of crude materials, it had been completely reliable up to that time.

His resolve to find an answer ultimately leads to his own downfall. He spends the next six years compiling information about their lives. Brother Juniper decides to use the occurrence as an opportunity to apply scientific inquiry to the event to determine why they were chosen to be the victims. In the disaster, five people fall to their deaths. When Wilder’s story opens, it is the eighteenth century and Brother Juniper, a priest of the Franciscan order, is a witness when a bridge across a mountain pass in Peru gives way. The plot of Wilder’s novel might have been inspired, it is believed, by a play written by Prosper Merimee.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is thought to be a work that served as a major contributor to the birth of the “disaster” genre where disparate people have their lives brought together by some sort of catastrophe. A friar who was witness to the disaster looks into the lives of those who died with the hope of finding some answer as to why it had to happen to each of them. The focal point of the story is the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, the events that led the people to perish in the accident, and how they found themselves on the bridge in the first place. The novel was the second of his career and in addition to the Pulitzer it has been named as one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Time magazine and by the American Modern Library. Two of his awards were for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and the other was for his 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Thornton Wilder is a triple Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright and novelist.

The bridge of saint luis rey