Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder is one of America's most important literary figures. Included here are four of his most acclaimed works, adapted for BBC Radio - plus bonus material exploring his life and career....

Exploring themes of love, goodness, and predestination, Wilder exposes the nature of his characters by examining their relationships....

A spare and haunting novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and has informed how literature addressed tragedy ever since its initial publication in 1927....

Five people are killed when a heavily traveled rope bridge in Peru collapses. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar, witnesses this event and this sets him on a quest....

""As close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature."" —Russell Banks ""There are books that haunt you down the years, books that seem to touch and stir something deep inside you. . . . Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey is of this kind."" —The...

“[Wilder's] finest and most beautiful novel. . . . Spanning two continents and several generations, it begins as a murder mystery and goes on to tell a story, at once dramatic and philosophical, about the range of human courage, aspirations, steadfastness, weakness, defeat and victory.”...

“If John Steinbeck’s mighty Grapes of Wrath is the tragic novel of the Great Depression, then Heaven’s My Destination is its comic masterpiece. —J.D. McClatchy A hilarious tale about goodness in a fallen world, Heaven’s My Destination introduces George Marvin Brush, one of...

The last of Thornton Wilder’s works published during his lifetime, Theophilus North is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventures of Wilder’s twin brother who died at birth. This edition features an updated afterword from Wilder’s nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating...

“Mr. Wilder has brought to his character the warmth which was totally lacking in the Caesar of schoolbooks and Shakespeare, and in his hero’s destruction there is the true catharsis.”—Edward Weeks, Atlantic First published in 1948, The Ides of March is a brilliant epistolary novel of the...

""Thornton Wilder's 1926 debut novel probes the inscrutable mystery of the ancient, fabulous wealth that confers a kind of immortality on its custodians, allowing their natures to form without concession or compromise to life beyond their privileged enclave. . . . [It] established Wilder as one...

Peru, 1714. A centuries-old bridge suddenly snaps, sending five travelers plunging to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a devout and curious monk, sets out to answer a haunting question: Why these five?