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  • Published: 20 August 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241338261
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

Death Comes for the Archbishop




Cather's masterpiece of life, death and faith in New Mexico, new to Modern Classics

Two French priests, friends since childhood, are sent to the newly created diocese of New Mexico. Life there is hard and frequently dangerous. Journeys between parishes are beset by the perils of bandits and storms. The people do not always want to hear the priests' message. But through their many years together, the two priests are sustained by friendship, faith and the magnificent landscapes of New Mexico, until at last they must be separated.

Cather's beautiful novel is renowned for its vivid writing on landscape and is a variation on her great theme: the making of America in the west.

  • Published: 20 August 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241338261
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Willa Cather

Willa Cather was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer, best known for her novels of Nebraskan frontier life. Born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia, she moved with her family to Catherton, Nebraska in 1883, and the landscape went on to have a formative effect on her. Before becoming a full-time writer, Cather worked as a journalist, a magazine editor and a teacher.


Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was published in 1912, followed by titles including O Pioneers! (1913); The Song of the Lark (1915); My Ántonia (1918); One of Ours (1922), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). She died in New York in 1947.

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Praise for Death Comes for the Archbishop

Quite simply a masterpiece ... I am completely bowled over by it; by the power of its writing, by the vividness of its scene painting and by the stories it tells ...This is a book which I go on rereading

A.N. Wilson

A tremendous, ranging story, economical and distilled as poetry

Jane Gardam

Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously in the reader, and cannot be summed up ... Cather's composed acceptance of mystery is a major, and rare, artistic achievement

A. S. Byatt