Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather, Claire Messud (Introduction)

Overview

Willa Cather's best known novel 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. 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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679728894
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/16/1990
Series:	Vintage Classics
Edition description:	REISSUE
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	26,607
Product dimensions:	5.14(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.65(d)
Lexile:	1150L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

WILLA CATHER, author of twelve novels, including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set. She died in 1947 in New York City.

Date of Birth:

December 7, 1873

Date of Death:

April 27, 1947

Place of Birth:

Winchester, Virginia

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., University of Nebraska, 1895

Table of Contents

Prologue: At Rome
Book One: The Vicar Apostolic
Book Two: Missionary Journey
Book Three: The Mass at Ácoma
Book Four: Snake Root
Book Five: Padre Martínez
Book Six: Doña Isabella
Book Seven: The Great Diocese
Book Eight: Gold under Pike’s Peak
Book Nine: Death Comes for the Archbishop

What People are Saying About This

A. S. Byatt

What intrigues me about [Cather] is the intelligence with which she combines her formidable learning in European art and literature with her 'new' uniformed or formless American subjects, the settlers and pioneers with their unrecorded lives and their diverse heritages.

Editorial Reviews

A truly remarkable book ... Soaked through and through with atmosphere ... From the riches of her imagination and sympathy Miss Cather has distilled a very rare piece of literature. It stands out, from the very resistance it opposes to classification.” —The New York Times

 "The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world as solidly as our five senses build the uiverse around us.” —Rebecca West

 “[Cather’s] descriptions of the Indian mesa towns on the rock are as beautiful, as unjudging, as lucid, as her descriptions of the Bishop’s cathedral. It is an art of ‘making,’ of clear depiction—of separate objects, whose whole effect works slowly and mysteriously in the reader, and cannot be summed up.... Cather’s composed acceptance of mystery is a major, and rare, artistic achievement.” —A. S. Byatt

From the Publisher

Pete Cross narrates Willa Cather's atmospheric classic, first published in 1927, with quiet assurance. In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour begins his priesthood by serving as the apostolic vicar of New Mexico. As the priest from the East navigates the desert Southwest--its stunning landscape, its intensely divided peoples, and its surprising caprices--Cross brings Cather's gorgeous descriptions and the priest's inner struggles to life. In more of a reading than a performance, Cross delivers the vastness of the desert, the seething racial conflicts, contentious religious differences, and the people's humanity. Cross doesn't use accents to identify American, Native American, or Hispanic speakers, but his intelligent narration celebrates Cather's emphasis on what's most important in a person's life--living fully and honestly. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile

Pete Cross narrates Willa Cather's atmospheric classic, first published in 1927, with quiet assurance. In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour begins his priesthood by serving as the apostolic vicar of New Mexico. As the priest from the East navigates the desert Southwest--its stunning landscape, its intensely divided peoples, and its surprising caprices--Cross brings Cather's gorgeous descriptions and the priest's inner struggles to life. In more of a reading than a performance, Cross delivers the vastness of the desert, the seething racial conflicts, contentious religious differences, and the people's humanity. Cross doesn't use accents to identify American, Native American, or Hispanic speakers, but his intelligent narration celebrates Cather's emphasis on what's most important in a person's life--living fully and honestly. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile