Death Comes For The Archbishop Annotated

Death Comes for the Archbishop is Willa Cather's best known novel. This epic, is a dream like, mythic story of a life lived simply in the southwestern desert. Father Jean Marie Latour is transferred to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. He finds a vast territory of hills, arroyos, and lonelness. Cather delivers a story of a simple life lived well and full in this her tour de force.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by American author Willa Cather. It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory. The novel was reprinted in the Modern Library series in 1931.

Willa Cather published the novel "Death Comes for Archbishop" in 1927. It's not really a standalone tale but a stylized retelling of the life of two late 19th century figures, Jean Baptiste Lemy and Joseph Projectus Machebbeuf, who were Roman Catholic clergy in New Mexico in the 1920s. The narrative is told in omniscient third person and includes snooping in on stories about the pair and their recollecties. The novel begins with an Irish Bishop in the New World named bishop Ferrand suggesting Jean - Marie LatOUR as Bishop of the newly created New Mexico diocese. Bishop Latour and his viar Joseph Vaillant travel from Ohio to new Mexico and also recount their entire year - long journey and their journey in the New territory. The approaches to faith and life of Vaillante and Latour are compared. Vaillant is fearless and actively advocates faith, while Latour is more reticent and intellectual. The characters confront different hurdles, like navigating the established clergy in New Mexico, several of whom are depictes as egregious in their greed along with other vices. Cather sympathetically depicts the Pueblos, Hopi and Navajo indigenous peoples, and discusses the Long Walk of the Navajo. The novel concludes with the passing of Archbishop Latour after Vaillant is chosen the very first Bishop of Colorado in Santa Fe. Literaryly significant, "Death Comes for Archbishop" has been included in numerous best selling lists and has long been praised because of its depiction of religious faith as well as social bonds in a developing democratic political order.

Death Comes for the Archbishop sprang from Willa Cather's love for the land and cultures of the American Southwest. Published in 1927 to both praise and perplexity, it has since claimed for itself a major place in twentieth-century literature. When Cather first visited the American Southwest in 1912, she found a new world to imagine and soon came to feel that "the story of the Catholic Church in the Southwest] was the most interesting of all its stories." The narrative follows Bishop Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, friends since their childhood in France, as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of Santa Fe subsequent to the Mexican War. While seeking to revive the church and build a cathedral in the desert, the clerics, like their historical prototypes, Bishop Jean Lamy and Father Joseph Machebeuf, face religious corruption, natural adversity, and the loneliness of living in a strange and unforgiving land. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents groundbreaking research, establishing a new text that reflects Cather's long and deep involvement with her story. The historical essay traces the artistic and spiritual development that led to its writing. The broad-ranging explanatory notes illuminate the elements of French, Mexican, Hispanic, and Native American cultures that meet in the course of the narrative; they also explain the part played by the land and its people-their history, religion, art, and languages. The textual essay and apparatus reveal Cather's creative process and enable the reader to follow the complex history of the text. Volume editor John J. Murphy is a professor of English at Brigham Young University. Textual editor Charles Mignon is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Frederick M. Link is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Nebraska. Kari A. Ronning is assistant editor for the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition.

There is something epic-and almost mythic-about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes 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, although he must contend with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. One of these events Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.

A Lost Lady is primarily a transcendent of realism, arriving shortly before The Great Gatsby which shares many of its characteristics. A characteristic of this type of novel is that the society is in transition from an old culture to a new, a power struggle that causes there to be a preference for an idealized past. It leads to a conflict between idealism and coarseness. Although Cather is better known for other works about Nebraska, this is her first modernist novel. Cather's work falls into the category of "literary regionalism", a narrow account of a culture within a national experience. At the time she was writing, 1923, there are really only two veins of cultural description, the international or pan-national account, and the regional national. The description of national culture came later.