This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.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>

"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 The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. </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&#146;s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning novel contains a new foreword by Russell Banks.

懷爾德在美國文學史上有著特殊的地位，他是唯一同時榮膺普利策戲劇奬和小說奬的美國作傢。作為劇作傢，他更是與尤金•奧尼爾、阿瑟•米勒、田納西•威廉斯齊名，並稱為美國四大現代戲劇傢。懷爾德為美國現代戲劇的靈魂人物與先驅，被譽為“二十世紀美國最後一位寓言傢”。

懷爾德傢族與中國緣分深厚。他的父親曾任美國駐華總領事，懷爾德曾在煙颱念過書。因此，他的作品中常常展現齣帶有中國氣息的哲思，如因果、平凡是真、活在當下。

譯者但漢鬆，1979年生於湖北鹹寜，文學博士，現任職於南京大學英文係，業餘從事文學翻譯和書評寫作，譯有托馬斯•品欽《性本惡》，書評散見於《書城》《南方周末》《三聯生活周刊》等媒體，目前主要為《紐約時報中文網》從事“讀讀小說”專欄的寫作。