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  • Published: 19 November 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784874452
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99

Death Comes for the Archbishop




A moving testament to friendship, published for the first time by Vintage Classics as part of our Willa Cather series.


A portrait of an enduring friendship, from one of America’s most celebrated novelists.

‘Quite simply a masterpiece’ Daily Telegraph

Two priests are despatched from Rome to New Mexico to reinvigorate Catholicism among the locals, knowing little of the challenges that await them. Over almost four decades they encounter a rich variety of people, from rebellious Mexican priests to steadfast Native Americans uninterested in changing their longstanding customs.

‘Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement’ AS Byatt

  • Published: 19 November 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784874452
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • 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

Its whole effect works slowly and mysteriously ... a major, and rare, artistic achievement

A. S. Byatt

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, Daily Telegraph