Thornton Wilder

American writer and playwright, best known for the Pulizer Prize awarded play OUR TOWN (1938), which was seen by the critic Brendan Gill as "a nightmare of passive awareness felt through all eternity", misinterpreted as a slice of Normann Rockwell-like Americana. Wilder's breakthrough novel was THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (1927), an examination of justice and altruism in the fates of five travelers in the 18-century Peru, who happen to be crossing the finest bridge in the land when it breaks and throws them into the gulf below. A priest interprets the story of each victim in an attempt to explain the working of divine providence. [Read more]

Our Town
Bard Books, 1975 (PhP 20.00)
winner of the Pulitzer Prize. "Our Town" is a vision of the enduring truths of human existence, played out with simplicity and great beauty on an almost-bare stage. It represents, in its author's own words, "an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The play's success was immediate and stunning, for it conveyed a profoundly touching universal message in a dramatic form more akin to the traditions of Oriental theater than to those of the West, and created a fresh, exciting theatrical experience.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Washington Square Press, 1969 (PhP 40.00)
"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" can be called the novel that firmly established Thornton Wilder in his prominent spot in American literature. This exquisite work, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Wilder in 1928, embodies writing of a very special sort. The gentle philosophy, as woven from the story of the five who fell from the bridge 200 years ago in Peru, is handled with such meticulous care in construction that the novel is still regarded as a model in contemporary letters. The faith of another era, another world, lives for today's reader.