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. His father was a newspaper editor who joined the Foreign Service, eventually being named as the U.S. Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, along with a twin brother who did not survive childbirth.
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. 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. Wilder fits their personal stories into a slender volume, told with a voice that resonates across years and cultures.Īlmost since its first publication, The Bridge of San Luis Rey has been recognized as a literary masterpiece. In the novel, Brother Juniper spends years compiling data about each victim in order to draw his conclusions. 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. 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. It tells the story of a religious man's spiritual quest to determine why God allows disasters to occur. 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.
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