<p> This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder. </p> <p> "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins <i>The Bridge of San Luis Rey,</i> one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. </p> <p> By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition. </p> This new edition of Wilder?s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning novel contains a new foreword by Russell Banks.