Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
Original Title: Death Comes for the Archbishop
Author: Willa Cather
Publication Date: 1932
Genres: Fiction, Historical fiction
File Version: 1.0
Willa Cather's best-known novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, is an epic—almost mythic—story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. He finds 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, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.