Death Comes for the Archbishop

Two French missionaries -- Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant -- make their way into the harsh, unexplored, mountainous region of New Mexico in the hope of revivifying there the religion that had been brought by Spanish priests and then left to decay in the hand of an insubordinate and materialistic clergy.
Father Latour, first bishop of the diocese, knew how to win the confidence of the Indians and to become a father of the Indians and to become a father indeed to the Mexicans.
Slowly and firmly he gained control of the padres of the region, gradually replacing the slothful with men stamped by his own ardor. The cathedral that he built in Santa Fe, using the stones of the region so that it might fit into its surroundings, was the crown of his missionary labor, in which he had succeeded in harmonizing two elements: the Catholic religion and the New Mexican way of life.

Willa Sibert Cather is well-known for her Great Plains-set books, such as O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark, and My ntonia. Her novel One of Ours, which takes place during World War I, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. When Willa Cather was nine years old, her family relocated from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska. Afterwards, the family made Red Cloud, Minnesota, their home. Cather spent ten years in Pittsburgh after earning her degree from the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she worked as a high school English teacher and magazine editor to support herself. She made her lifelong home in New York City when she moved there at the age of 33, though she also traveled extensively and made frequent trips to her summer house on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She lived her final 39 years with Edith Lewis, her domestic partner, before receiving a breast cancer diagnosis and passing away from a brain hemorrhage. Beside her, in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire, plot, lies Lewis. As a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience, Cather attained prominence.