Death Comes for the Archbishop Study Guide

Though Willa Cather is best known for fiction set in the Great Plains and the American Southwest, she was actually born in a small town in Virginia, in 1873. At age nine, Cather moved to Nebraska, where her family started farming alongside a rush of immigrants from Northern Europe. Cather began writing stories and journalistic pieces as a student at the University of Nebraska, and in 1913 she published her first major novel, O Pioneers!, an account of the rural Nebraska where she grew up. Cather then followed up this first successful endeavor with My Ántonia (1918), often considered to be one of her greatest works. It was in this period that Cather first traveled to the Southwest, falling in love with New Mexico in particular (which would become the setting for several of her major works, including a chunk of the 1925 novel The Professor’s House and, crucially, Death Comes for the Archbishop). Her prose is notable for its even-handed tone and lyrical simplicity. Cather lived for 38 years in a domestic partnership with Edith Lewis, her editor, and died of breast cancer at age 73. 

In 1846, the United States invaded Mexico, beginning the two-year conflict that would come to be known as the Mexican-American War. The war ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when Mexico ceded what is today the Southwestern part of the United States (as well as California). However, as Death Comes for the Archbishop demonstrates, these new boundaries were fraught, and U.S. authority was often contested by those living in the newly ceded territories. Five years later, the United States added to its territory with the Gadsden Purchase of 1953, buying some additional border land from Mexico. In this moment of American territorial consolidation, the controversial figure Pope Pius IX was determined to create a vicariate in what is now known as New Mexico. He appointed Jean Baptiste Lamy (fictionalized in the novel as Jean-Marie Latour) as the new bishop, though Lamy would have to negotiate with the Bishop Zubiría of Durango, in Mexico, for years before his authority would be officially recognized. Though Cather’s novel paints Lamy (through his fictional counterpart Latour) as a positive figure, Lamy’s critics saw him set a dangerous precedent with his refusal to allow Mexican priests real power.

The plot of Death Comes for the Archbishop was directly inspired by a book Cather read while on a visit to Santa Fe, entitled The Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf. Cather based Vaillant off of Machebeuf, while Latour was based off of Jean Baptiste Lamy, the real-life Archbishop of Mexico. Cather’s characters also speak frequently of James Fenimore Cooper, who is famous for romantic portrayals of the American frontiers like The Last of the Mohicans (though Cather’s own work was much less sensationalized). Interestingly, while Cather’s books are always centered on the United States both geographically and thematically, many of her greatest stylistic influences were European. Cather described Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as “the greatest book ever written,” and she often said that her focus on quotidian detail and slow, steady pacing was inspired by the French author Gustave Flaubert (best known for Madame Bovary).