SOURCE: “Death Comes for the Archbishop: Cather's Mystery and Manners,” in American Literature, Vol. 57, No. 3, October, 1985, pp. 395-406.

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 matter—within the space of twelve months.

If the components of great art remain subtle and elusive, the springs of artistic creativity are even more so. How a writer produces an enduring fiction is a question even the writer cannot answer with certainty. But because unanswerable questions are the most tantalizing, we readers find questions regarding the components of a particular creative moment irresistible. Of all the teasers in American literary history, however, none has haunted me more than this question: How did Willa Cather write both My Mortal Enemy and Death Comes for the Archbishop within a single...