Death Comes for the Archbishop
“Cather’s Nuevo México is a potpourri of cultures and language…Parts of this novel will feel uncomfortably dated; Cather’s sympathies clearly lie, for instance, with the French Jesuits as they seek to stamp out the hybridized Catholicism practiced by the mestizo priests of Taos. But her careful portrait also captures some of the impossible arrogance of the priests’ quest—and, like all great villains, hers have basically good intentions.”
Publishers Weekly
A Publishers Weekly Pick of 10 Must-Read Crime Books set in the American West
One of Time Magazine's Best 100 English-Language Novels from 1923–2005
One of the Modern Library's 100 Best English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century
A Life Magazine Pick of 100 Outstanding Books of 1924 to 1944
A Western Writers of America Pick of the 10 Best Western Novels of the 20th Century
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, 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, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.
Praise