The Bridge of San Luis Rey ~ by Thornton Wilder. Pocket Library #PL-36, 4th printing, 1956. Vintage paperback, 120 pages. GOOD condition.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a 1927 novel by American author Thornton Wilder. It tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them. A friar who has witnessed the tragic accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die. Philosophically, the book explores the problem of evil, or the question of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem innocent or undeserving of their fate. The story makes use of two historical characters, the man who was Viceroy of Peru at the time, and his lover, a street singer known as La Perichole, who, in real life, was named Micaela Villegas.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and in 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. The book was quoted by Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Since then its popularity has grown enormously.

This book is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events before the disaster.