The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) is Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, a work made up of three connected stories detailing the experiences of several people killed by a collapsing bridge in eighteenth-century Peru.

The Making of Americans (1925) is a novel by Wilder's good friend Gertrude Stein. This narrative about several generations of Stein's family uses her trademark techniques of simple language and repetition. Her goal was to create a sensation of a constant present, to begin again and again because "repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding." Stein's techniques greatly influenced Wilder.

Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), is a drama by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. The narrative revolves around a seventeenth-century German canteen woman who is an allegorical figure representing the destructive forces of capitalism. The play exemplifies Brecht's ideas of epic-theater and the anti-illusion...