The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a short historical novel set in 18th-century colonial Peru. The book can also be read as a parable that uses the random tragedy of the bridge's collapse to explore, without definitively answering, questions about the existence of God and human agency.
Wilder wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey during the 1920s. However, he deliberately cultivates a formal and antiquated tone that would have seemed anachronistic even to the original readers and that sets this book apart from works by other contemporary giants such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos. Wilder's style conveys that The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a novel of ideas, not a realistic representation of modern life, and further encourages the reader to see the book as a parable.
Of American writers, Wilder most closely resembles Nathaniel Hawthorne, who worked almost a century earlier but likewise set his novels in the past to create distance from contemporary life. Just as Hawthorne explores the moral concerns of his own era in intentionally unrealistic novels such as The Scarlet Letter, Wilder does the same in The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
