Death comes for the archbishop

Willa Cather

242 pages, parution le 30/04/2023

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QUANTITÉ

Résumé

Set in the 1850s, this short novel is about the struggles and triumphs of a bishop, Jean Marie Latour, and his loyal friend and vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant. They have been sent to reawaken and spread the Roman Catholic faith in an area where it has grown weak: New Mexico, recently annexed by the United States. Desolate and remote, the territory is home to many diverse groups: Mexicans, including those on ranches established for hundreds of years; Indians, who have been there much longer and who are divided by language and customs into thirty nations; and newcomers-hunters, fur trappers, and those seeking gold. This book is as much their story as it is the story of the priests and the vast changes the land itself underwent in those years. Death Comes for the Archbishop was a departure for Willa Cather, who had already published eight novels before publishing this one in 1927. The novel doesn't try to follow a single unified story the way many historical novels do; instead, its nine chapters are episodic, filled with stories, legends, histories, and descriptions of the Southwest, which Cather had been visiting for many years before she started writing it. Many of its main characters, including the bishop and his vicar, are thinly disguised versions of real-life historical figures, while other famous New Mexicans of the day, including the frontiersman Kit Carson and the "powerful old priest," Antonio José Martínez, appear under their actual names.

L'auteur - Willa Cather

Willa Cather (1873 -1947) was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well. In 1931 Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the US, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935. Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form. Cather's work is often marked by its nostalgic tone, her subject matter and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains.