Six months before she died, Willa Cather called her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop her “best book.” The Atlantic magazine concurred, including Archbishop on its Great American Novels list in 2024. A perennial favorite for people who love New Mexico, the novel tells an unusual story of two French priests and best friends serving on the American frontier before the arrival of the railroad. This Western work of fiction is loosely based on two historical figures, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Bishop Joseph Machebeuf.
Cather visited the Southwest six times between 1912 and 1926, and from those journeys came three novels, the last of which was Death Comes for the Archbishop. The novel is beautifully written in Cather’s sparse but descriptive language. The novel’s chapters—a series of tableaus in the fictional Archbishop Latour’s life—are based on Cather’s own research and travels, and the many places she described are real: Acoma Pueblo, Chimayó, Taos, and the Lamy quarry that provided the ochre sandstone for the St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. Garrett Peck, author of the newly released The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, explores Cather and her partner Edith Lewis’s travels through the Southwest to write one of the 20th century’s greatest novels and Cather’s favorite.
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