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Hardcover
Publisher: Modern Library
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Introduction by A. S. Byatt
Willa Cather’s story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian 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.
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| Great story, terrible edition |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
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This is a fantastic novel, movingly and beautifully written and well worth reading. However, this edition is terrible. I'm a grad student, and purchased it to save money, and regret making that choice. The text is riddled with errors and many, many words are printed without a space between them--this happens many times on every page of the book. It creates much more than an inconvenience, it almost ruins what should be an extraordinary reading experience. So, read this novel, just don't purchase this shoddy edition.
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| One of Cather's masterpieces |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Willa Cather is in my opinion one of the great American novelists and Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of her masterpieces.The landscape is a major force in the book it seems like a seperate character and Cather's powers oofdescription are at their highest in this book The main character, Jean Latour , is the first bishop of New Mexico after America had won the territory from Mexico in the Mexican War. He faces many struggles with his friend and vicar Joseph Vaillant. Latour is a well wriien chracter and along with the descriptions of landscape and the cultuere Latour confronts plus several well written and compelling secondary characters makes this a 5 star book in my opinion
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| An American Classic |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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When I read this book I had just finished the last volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. After such a verbose book it was a delight to read this concise prose that captured the moment in such a compelling way. Her portrayal of the Southwest Indians was especially moving. Her respect for them and sorrow over their plight was unusual for her time. I truly enjoyed every page and hated to see it end.
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| Virtue is a Given |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP is both a celebration of the diverse strands of America's nineteenth century past and a minute analysis of the virtues of two men who helped shape that past. The publishing of the book in 1927 was only fifty years after the major events described so there were probably many elder readers who remembered quite well these events. Most of the plot occurs in the Southwest before, during, and after the Civil War. The America described is not the shoot-`em-ups of the pulp cowboy fiction. Rather, Cather portrays a panorama that includes as much visual as historic. When Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant head for Santa Fe to tender to the needs of the natives, Cather allows their interaction with other characters to shrink into the background where the bleak and unforgiving sands of the desert hold sway. We read of the heroic efforts of the two priests to establish the primacy of the Church in a land so savage that even many of the resident clerics have become corrupted. We read of numerous tribes of Indians and Mexican peasants who are not convinced that the God of the Church is the one true God. We read of nasty brutes like Buck Scales and heroic women like Magdalena, Scales' wife, both of whom prove that a person's inner worth is less a function of geography and more one of integrity. Encompassing the events that span several decades suggests that this is a plot driven book. We note the testing of both priests during that time, but we are also sure that they will avoid the snares that rendered their predecessor clergy as unfit to serve. What holds us in thrall is not how Latour and Vaillant maintain their respective moral compasses but how they ensure that others can establish their own. As the decades unfold, South Western America changes for the better. If the mountain cliffs and pueblos could speak, they would surely comment on a slowly increasing nobility of a peasantry that needed a mere two priests to show that when death comes for an archbishop, that death is but one more step in the cycle of life.
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| O Willa! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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If you love exceptional writing this is a book you will savor. Willa Cather is a writer that not only creates a vision but catches the soul of the people, period, and settings she writes about. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a book for readers and writers. It is especially meaningful if you have ever visited New Mexico and Santa Fe and treasured its rich history. The simple elegance of the author's style is what has made this book a classic.
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