Death Comes for the Archbishop (AmazonClassics Edition)

Inspired by real-life characters and events, Willa Cather’s historical novel follows the committed efforts of two friends, Bishop Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, to establish a diocese in the newly acquired US territory of New Mexico. Their arduous and picaresque journey is set against a gorgeous landscape of mesas, canyons, and arroyos inhabited by the Pueblo, Hopi, and Navajo people, the place becoming almost another character itself. But in addition to the epic story of this remarkable journey, Cather’s digressive meditations—on self-confrontation and adaptation, on life in all its miraculous mundanity, and on uncertain, often disputed borders and boundaries—are perhaps the most enduring achievement of this uniquely American “Western.”

Revised edition: Previously published as Death Comes for the Archbishop, this edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.