Thornton Wilder's classic novel features previously unpublished notes and other illuminating documentary material as well as an updated afterword by his nephew, Tappan Wilder, and a foreword by Russell Banks. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, one of the towering achievements in American fiction, and a novel read throughout the world, begins. By fate or chance, a monk has witnessed the collapse. Brother Juniper, moved by the tragedy, embarks on a quest to prove a higher order is at work in the deaths of those who perished. His search leads readers on a timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.