How long does it take to read The Bridge of San Luis Rey?
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder takes about 2 hours 38 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 38 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1927. 144 pages, about 39,600 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 38 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 110 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them. Philosophically, the book explores the problem of evil, or the question, of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem "innocent" or "undeserving". It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and in 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. The book was quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Since then its popularity has grown enormously. The book is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events before the disaster.
Subjects: Accident victims, Accidents, American fiction, Bridges, Fiction, History
