Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Inscribed to Edward Steichen
“from his admiring sitter”
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.
8vo.; green cloth, title label on front panel and spine; spine darkened, label browned; extremities nicked and frayed; partial coffee mug stain to the front panel. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of her best-known work, incorporating nearly 200 minor variations and three additional sections which did not appear in its serial publication (Forum 77, 1-6 [January-June 1927]). (Crane 16).
Cather presented this—along with copies of My Ántonia and A Lost Lady—to the photographer Edward Steichen on the occasion of her sitting scheduled to coincide with the publication of Death Comes for the Archbishop; that sitting resulted in the now canonical portrait photo which adorns the dust-jackets of Cather biographies by E.K. Brown and Hermione Lee. The inscription, presented prior to the book’s September publication, reads, "For Steichen, and I awfully hope he’ll like it. Willa Cather August 24 1927."
Based on the story of the first bishop of New Mexico, Death Comes for the Archbishop received great praise from Cather’s fellow novelist Rebecca West, who wrote:
The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us. This account of the activities of a French priest who was given a diocese in the southwest during the late ‘forties, impresses us first of all by its amazing sensory achievements. She has within herself a sensitivity that constantly presents her with a body of material which would overwhelm most of us, so that we would give up all idea of transmitting it and would sink into a state of passivity; and she has also a quality of mountain-pony sturdiness that makes her push on unfatigued under her load and give an accurate account of every part of it… (“The Classic Artist,” The Strange Necessity, by Rebecca Est, 1928, pp. 233-40)
Nearly forty years later, Louis Auchincloss extended his compliments:
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) was her most popular and is, in some ways, her most excellent novel…The paradox in Willa Cather’s theory of fiction, the novel démeublé, or stripped of all unnecessary descriptions and stratagems, the novel that must almost flow by some process of artistic free association from a mind that has fully assimilated the characters and scenes to be portrayed, is that she herself did not abide by it. Although her completed novels may be somewhat shapeless, they are filled with little gems of short stories, insets, that might have been conceived and plotted by Guy de Maupassant himself. …Death Comes for the Archbishop is like a gallery of brilliantly lit dioramas in a historical museum illustrating life in the American Southwest a century ago. Everything falls into place because the reader accepts the era and the locale as in themselves creating a frame and hence a form… (“Willa Cather,” Pioneers and Caretakers, by Louis Auchincloss, 1965, pp. 114-17)
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