Death Comes for the Archbishop
First edition dust jacket
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| Author | Willa Cather |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
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Publication date
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1927 |
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by American author Willa Cather. It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory.
The novel was reprinted in the Modern Library series in 1931. It was included in Life Magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924-1944. It was also included on Time's 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 and Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and was chosen by the Western Writers of America to be the 7th-best "Western Novel" of the 20th century.
The narrative is based on two historical figures, Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf and rather than any one singular plot, is the stylized re-telling of their lives serving as Roman Catholic clergy in New Mexico. The narrative has frequent digressions, either in terms of stories related to the pair (including the story of the Our Lady of Guadeloupe and the murder of an oppressive Spanish priest at Acoma Pueblo) or through their recollections. The narrator is in the Third-Person Omniscient style. Cather includes many fictionalized accounts of actual historical figures, including Kit Carson, Manuel Antonio Chaves and Pope Gregory XVI.
In the prologue, Bishop Montferrand, a French bishop who works in the New World, is soliciting 3 cardinals at Rome to pick his candidate for the newly created diocese of New Mexico (which has recently passed into American hands). Bishop Montferrand is successful in getting his candidate, the Auvergnat Jean-Marie Latour, recommended by the cardinals over the recommendation of the Bishop of Durango (whose territory New Mexico had previously fallen under). One of the cardinals, a Spaniard named Allende, alludes to a painting by El Greco taken from his family by a missionary to the New World and lost, and asks for the new Bishop to search for it, but this painting is never mentioned again.
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