Willa Cather, Nicholas Gaskill (Introducer)

Death Comes For The Archbishop

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Summary

When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, he finds a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indigenous in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock–while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.

Death Comes for the Archbishop shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.

Reviews

Quite simply a masterpiece . . . I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells . . . This is a book which I go on rereading.
A. N Wilson, Daily Telegraph

About the author

Willa Cather

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and was about nine years old when her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she worked for the Nebraska State Journal, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. There she joined McClure’s magazine. After meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, appeared in 1912, but her place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers! published in 1913, followed by her most famous pioneer novel, My Antonia, in 1918. In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. Her other novels include Shadows on the Rock, The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, and Lucy Gayheart. She died in 1947.

INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY
NICHOLAS GASKILL is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College. He is the author of Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color and editor of the The Lure of Whitehead.

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