Death Comes For The Archbishop

About The Author American author Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) was raised in Virginia and Nebraska and wrote eloquently about life on the Great Plains, including My Ántonia (1918), considered her masterpiece. In 1923 she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, set during WWI.

There is something epic-and almost mythic-about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico.

What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief.

In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows-gently, although he must contend with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.

One of these events Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.