Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Inscribed With Love And Admiration
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Knopf, 1927.
8vo.; title page printed in blue and black; Borzoi Book patterned endpapers; brown cloth stamped in orange and brown; spine darkened and rubbed, minor wear to extremities. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition, fourth printing; the first printing (a limited issue) and second and third printings were bound and distributed prior to publication, and are identified by a limitation notice in the first and a special copyright notice in the second and third. Death Comes For The Archbishop first appeared serially in Forum 77, nos. 1-6 (January-June 1927), lacking three sections which later appeared in book form and with nearly 200 minor variations in the text. Crane A16.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to a “long-standing intimate” (Edel and Brown, 326): "For Myra Hess With my love and admiration. Willa Cather." Cather met Hess (1890-1965), by then an internationally known pianist, in New York—Hess had begun frequent tours of the States in 1922. (In 1941 Hess would become Dame Myra Hess for her direction of the National Gallery Concerts in London during World War II.) The Knopfs, who presented Cather to Hess, also introduced her to other well-known musicians, and even gifted her an expensive phonograph on which to play the many recordings sent her by Yehudi Menuhin.
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather’s best-known work, is based on the story of the first bishop of New Mexico. Among the book’s admirers upon its publication was 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 West, 1928, pp. 233-40)
Nearly forty years later, Louis Auchincloss extended his praise:
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 strategems, 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, 1965, 114-17)
For Cather, an especially intimate inscription.
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