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From Big Think – Is Thornton Wilder God?

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People are not talking enough about The Bridge of San Luis Rey. No question, it’s a well-respected novel: it won the Pulitzer in 1928 and came in at #37 on the MLA’s list of “100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century.” It was adapted, apparently, into a 2004 Robert De Niro film, and it had a brief turn in the historical spotlight when Tony Blair quoted it in his 9/11 memorial speech. All well and good—but where is the buzz, where is the chatter? Who has nudged you lately, at your water cooler or watering hole, to ask: “Have you read Thornton Wilder’s prose masterpiece, The Bridge of San Luis Rey?”

 

Well, have you? It’s outstanding. As pure prose lyricism it ranks with anything by Nabokov or Cather or Fitzgerald. Actually it may owe a debt to Fitzgerald; it debuted two years after Gatsby and sustains something of the same tone of ironic elegy. Other influences it flaunts more openly: one of its characters is based on the life and letters of Madame de Sévigné, while its prose samples the baroque flavor of the Spanish Golden Age plays to which it makes frequent and loving allusion. But if the cords that bind it to other works are easy enough to trace, Bridge is simultaneously its own world: small, exotic, and realized to perfection.

 

Continue reading Is Thornton Wilder God? by Austin Allen at Big Think. 

The post From Big Think – Is Thornton Wilder God? appeared first on Thornton Wilder.


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