Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather

Death Comes for the Archbishop

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Production Details

Introduced by A. S. Byatt

Illustrated by Finn Campbell-Notman

Bound in buckram. Set in Baskerville.

Approx.240 pages; frontispiece and 6 full-page colour illustrations.

Size: 9" x 6¼".

In 1851, Father Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant arrive in Santa Fe, New Mexico, determined to win converts for the Catholic church. Travelling across the endless desert plains, they encounter some priests given over to greed and corruption and others who live in simplicity amongst the Indian Hopi and Navajo peoples. Latour and Vaillant are both dedicated to their faith and awed by the richness and sensuality of the ancient Indian traditions they encounter. When they lay the foundations for a cathedral to be built of the local golden rock, the two men embark on what will be a decades-long struggle.

Death Comes for the Archbishop offers an evocative and powerful portrait of New Mexico at a crucial time in its history. This was raw frontier territory, only recently made part of America, still distinctly Mexican and Indian in character and beliefs. Willa Cather based her story on the real lives of two Vatican emissaries, but her genius was in weaving together a series of events and scenes in a colourful depiction of an entire people and its way of life.


Introduced by A. S. Byatt
‘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 is best known for her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance, which was both a major critical and popular success. She has written other awardwinning novels as well as collections of short stories and several works of literary criticism.


‘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’ NEW YORK TIMES

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Cather was famous for her powerful sense of place and landscape, always delivered with simplicity and a lightness of touch. Set against the gorgeous landscape of rugged mountains and canyons, steep-faced mesas and unexpected gardens crowded with tamarisk trees, Death Comes for the Archbishop is more than a novel, it is a profound meditation on spirituality and the clash of cultures.