![]() ![]() They are societies that existed for thousands of years, uninterrupted, unimpeded. The arid deserts of New Mexico are the ancestral abodes of different Indian groups, particularly the Navajos and the Hopis. That can be said for Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Whilst there were a lot that didn’t live up to the hype or to the expectations, there were some that literally knocked the ball out of the ballpark. Let us admit, us readers do read a lot of books out of sheer curiosity. As always, Cather makes her landscape – the arid New Mexican plains – a palpable character in the story, and she shows an early empathy with the Navajo and Hopi nations’ reverence for unspoiled nature. In Cather’s hand they become the aged, withdrawn bishop Jean Marie Latour and his practical and hopeful vicar, Joseph Vaillant, who struggle together to bring Old World religion to the New World by building a cathedral in the desert Southwest. Considered by many to be Cather’s greatest work, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is an experimental novel based on the real-life experiences of two French missionaries in New Mexico. The author of 12 novels and nearly 60 short stories, Cather won a Pulitzer Prize in 1922. One of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, Willa Cather mined her childhood experiences on the Nebraska plains and her later love for the Southwest to create timeless tales of romance, tragedy, and spiritual seeking. Publisher: Book-of-the-Month Club by arrangement with Alfred A. ![]()
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