Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics- Death Comes For The Archbishop

In 1848 three cardinals and a missionary decide the fate of a parish priest, Jean Marier Latour. He is to go to New Mexico to win for Catholicism the south-west of America. He reforms and revivifies, after 40 years of service achieving a reconciliation between his faith and the peasants.

When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, he finds a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indigenous 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.

Death Comes for the Archbishop shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.