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 Vitae Edition
In 1848, 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 unforgiving and seemingly-endless desert on mules in
attempt to reclaim the region from corrupt priests who have taken
mistresses, exhibited greed, and inflicted abuse and genocide on the
Mexican and Indigenous residents. But as Father Latour spends more time
in New Mexico with the people who have inhabited and influenced it for
centuries, he begins to realize that the task he was sent to do is more
complicated than anticipated. Rather than leave, though, Father Latour
decides to stay and uphold his commitment to the Church and his faith,
and gains an eye-opening perspective along the way. 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.
