Death Comes for the Archbishop Summary
Willa Cather

Biography EssayWilla Cather is an outstanding example of a writer whose work is deeply rooted in a sense of place and at the same time universal in its treatment of theme and character. The corner of ... Read more

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," Willa Cather observed in her second novel, O Pioneers!, but the same theme resonates throughout all of her work. Passionately in... Read more

"I do not take myself seriously as a poet," said Willa Cather in a 1925 interview. Having by then published many short stories and six novels (of an eventual twelve) and having won a Pulitzer Prize fo... Read more

During the 1973 Willa Cather centennial seminar in Lincoln, Nebraska, Leon Edel--the Henry James biographer who collaborated with E. K. Brown on the first important biographical study of Cather--put h... Read more

In the following review, Dodd offers high praise for Cather's portrayal of the priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop. After reading Death Comes for the Archbishop, I indulged myself in a... Read more

In the following essay, Stewart argues that Cather borrowed heavily from Puvis de Chavannes's series of frescoes of the life of Saint Genevieve and Holbein's “Dance of Deathȁ... Read more

In the following essay, the Stoucks argue that Cather's faith in the redemptive effects of and similarities between art and religion form a fundamental theme in Death Comes for the Archbishop. ... Read more

In the following essay, Murphy maintains that Cather's view of history in Death Comes for the Archbishop is “cyclical” in that the heroic archetypes of the American West repeat th... Read more

In the following essay, Doane outlines ways in which Bishop Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop is similar to Godfrey St. Peter in Cather's novel The Professor's House. Willa Cat... Read more

In the following essay, Skaggs addresses the question of how Cather could have written My Mortal Enemy and Death Comes for the Archbishop—two novels radically different in tone and subject matt... Read more

In the following essay, Shaw relates Cather's own sexual and gender crisis to her portrayal of the female characters in Death Comes for the Archbishop. How do we explain three quietly iconoc... Read more

In the following essay, Fisher-Wirth categorizes Death Comes for the Archbishop as the fifth in the series of Cather's novels—including My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor�... Read more

In the following essay, Warner discusses the artistic liberties Cather took in telling the story of the two historical New Mexican bishops in Death Comes for the Archbishop, finding that, while Cather... Read more

In the following review, West contrasts Cather's simple yet evocative story-telling with the more complicated modes of modernist writers such as James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, finding Cather&#... Read more

In the following essay, Greene characterizes Death Comes for the Archbishop as a “search for the moral self,” which he also believes informs Cather's other works. Of the works ... Read more

In the following essay, Charles maintains that the title of Death Comes for the Archbishop belies the novel's focus on life and Christian love. Willa Cather's masterful novel, Death C... Read more

In "Death Comes for the Archbishop," Willa Cather uses inner character conflicts and the character's relationship with the land to create powerful characters. Father (or Bishop) Latour's confl... Read more