Death Comes for the Archbishop

How long can faith persevere? Father Jean Marie Latour a missionary priest arrives in the territory of New Mexico newly acquired by the United States in 1851. He is greeted by a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. Over the next four decades Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock—while contending with unforgiving terrain derelict and sometimes rebellious priests and his own loneliness. Willa Cather tells the story of this limitless craggy beauty with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry. Death Comes for the Archbishop leaves no doubt as to why Cather is acknowledged as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.