SOURCE: “Latour's Schismatic Church: The Radical Meaning in the Pictorial Methods of Death Comes for the Archbishop,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 71-88.

In the following essay, Schwind examines the meaning of Cather's pictorial compositions in Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Shortly after Death Comes for the Archbishop completed its serialized run in Forum magazine in 1927, Willa Cather expressed doubts about the novel's reception. In a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an old Nebraska friend and fellow writer, Cather cynically wondered: Could a novel featuring the Virgin Mary as its leading lady hope to survive in a world of motion picture romance and glamour?¹ Although it had been widely read in Forum, Cather evidently had become less certain about the novel's popular appeal by the time it was due to be published in book form than she had been when she first delivered her...