Death Comes for the Archbishop

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For the 150th anniversary of Willa Cather's birth, and for the first time in Penguin Classics, her quietly beautiful novel of one man's life as he encounters the harsh landscape of the New Mexico desert and the people who inhabit it, with an introduction by National Book Award finalist Kali Fajardo-Anstine A Penguin Classic In 1851, following the US's recent acquisition of the American Southwest from Mexico, the young bishop Father Jean Marie Latour receives instruction from the Vatican to oversee a newly created diocese in New Mexico. With his good friend Father Joseph Vaillant in tow, the pair travel through the harsh and seemingly-endless desert on mules in attempt to convert local residents into the Catholic faith and build a Romanesque cathedral in Santa Fe. But as Father Latour spends more time in New Mexico with the Mexican and Indigenous people who inhabit it, he begins to realize that the task he was sent to do is futile, as the local people are devoted to their own religions--some of which go back millennia--and in many cases refuse to be converted. Rather than leave, though, Father Latour decides to stay and help out the local people however he can, and in the process, gains a more inclusive and progressive outlook that shapes his views on issues that we continue to face today, including colonization, the genocide of Native Americans, and the erasure of Indigenous culture. Written in 1927 at a time when Cather herself was expanding her own ideas of race, religion, and gender, Death Comes for the Archbishop remains a moving account of one man's physical and spiritual journey of understanding in naturalistic prose as sparse as the desert plains.

Author Bio

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and raised on a Nebraska ranch. She isknown for her beautifully evocative short stories and novels about the American West. Cather became the managing editor for McClures Magazine in 1906 and lived for forty years in New York City with her companion Edith Lewis. In 1922 Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the nationally bestselling author of the novel Woman of Light and the widely acclaimed short story collection Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of an American Book Award. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and the 2021 recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Fajardo-Anstine is the 20222024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. She is from Denver, Colorado.