Russell Banks and The Bridge of San Luis Rey

By Tappan Wilder

Russel Banks, PC Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

Some 20 years ago, the Wilder Family  and HarperCollins embarked on an ambitious new publishing program: new editions of Thornton Wilder’s novels and major plays,  each featuring a Foreword  by one of Wilder’s fellow  novelists and playwrights.  It was the poet and librettist J.D. McClatchy’s suggestion that I approach  Russell Banks to write the Foreword for  Wilder’s most famous novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  The deal required a single phone call with an immediately receptive and enthusiastic Russell Banks. We mourn his death, and  consider it an  honor to include here the first paragraph of his wonderfully  informed, moving  and  timeless  Foreword to the story about  five travelers who die when an Incan rope bridge fails on July 20th 1714.  

“Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey is as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature. Written near the end of the Roaring Twenties by a man barely out of his own twenties, it nonetheless feels, in its exquisite universality and ease of timeless application, ancient, classical, almost biblical. When we read the novel today, we nod in admiration, and we wonder at its uncanny ability to describe ourselves to ourselves in terms that are both essential to our species and particular to our times. One merely has to consider the central question raised by the novel, which, according Wilder himself, was simply: ‘Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?’ It is perhaps the largest and most profoundly personal philosophical inquiry that we can undertake. It is the question that defines us as human beings. “