Death Comes for the Archbishop | Building the Cathedral: Imagination, Christianity, and Progress in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop
In the following essay, Birns explores how Cather’s choice of setting and character in Death Comes for the Archbishop countered a “restrictively nationalistic American identity” popular in the early twentieth century.
From the day of its publication, Death Comes for the Archbishop has been one of Willa Cather’s most popular novels. Critics, though, have chafed against the book’s historical setting and its interpretation of American culture. Many readers, especially among Cather’s original audience, were completely unfamiliar with the donnée of the novel, which concerns the career of the Roman Catholic Archbishop Lamy of Santa Fe in the mid-nineteenth century.
This was not a matter of mere ignorance, but a result of the fact that the conventional fable of American origins...
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