num_pages: 345
description: Willa Cather's best known novel is an epic--almost mythic--story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows--gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.
language: English
title: Death Comes for the Archbishop
titlecomplete: Death Comes for the Archbishop
characters: Joseph Vaillant, Jean Marie Latour
genres: Fiction, Historical, Religion, American, Westerns, Literature, Classics, Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 36095
places: New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico
awards: awardedAt: -1262275200000
name: William Dean Howells Medal
publisher: Modern Library