Death Comes for the Archbishop

Description

Death Comes for the Archbishop is Willa Cather’s best known novel. It is an epic, almost mythic, story of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.

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. It is 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. Throughout that time he contends with an unforgiving landscape. The environment is further complicated by derelict and, sometimes, openly rebellious priests. Out of these events and his lonliness, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.