Death Comes for the Archbishop

2023 Reprint of the 1927 Edition. 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.

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.

James Paul Old of Valparaiso University uses Death Comes for the Archbishop as a literary example of the notion that religious faith is able to develop and maintain strong social bonds in nascent democratic political orders. He argues that even though Cather’s early novels typically represent religious characters as closed-minded, her personal religious realignment at the time allowed her to alter her perspective and develop more positive religious characters, in this case Catholic ones.