SOURCE: “Death Comes for the Archbishop: Worlds Old and New,” in In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction, The University of Georgia Press, 1977, pp. 105-30.

In the following essay, Watkins discusses Cather's diverse cast of characters, settings, and themes in Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Few narratives treat a greater diversity of cultures than Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop.¹ Set in Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado, this novel portrays to some extent the life of many kinds of peoples: the Spanish fathers of the early days, Pueblo and Navajo Indians, Mexican descendants of Spaniard and Indian, French missionary priests brought to the Southwest by Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy just after New Mexico became a territory of the United States, and Anglo-Americans who succeeded the Mexicans. Within these cultures, especially among the numerous pueblo villages of the Southwest, are infinite variations of language, legend...