Critical Assessment "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, seventy-five years after its first publication, 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 [...]