Death Comes for the Archbishop [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONDeath Comesfor the Archbishop1927. Willa Gatherhad been working on, reading about and visiting the deserts and Indian villages of the Southwest for fifteen years before she wrote it, and had come, she says, to the conclusion that 'the story of the Catholic Church in that country was the most interesting of all its stories.' In earlier novels she had dealt with the experiences of pioneers and setders in the raw, featureless land of Nebraska: from very early days she had been interested in texts like Castaneda's account of the Coronado expedition, and in the great American historian and explorer Francis Parkman's accounts of his own journeys amongst Indians and frontiersmen, as well as in his series of historical accounts of French setders and missionaries in the New World. During a visit to Santa C ruz in New Mexico Cather formed a friendship with a Belgian priest. Father Haltermann, from whom she learned much about 'Indians and their traditions', and also about the nineteenth-century French missionaries who are the heroes of Death Comes for the Archbishop. She tells us (in a letter published in the Commonweal) that Archbishop Lamy, the first Bishop of New Mexico, 'had become a sort of invisible personal friend' long before she conceived the idea of writing about the missionaries. A bronze statue of him in Santa Fe interested her in 'a pioneer churchman who looked so well-bred and distinguished. In his pictures one felt the same thing, something fearless and fine and very, very well-bred - something that spoke of race. What I felt curious about was the daily life of such a man in a crude frontier society.'Father Lamy must be one of the most immediate and deliberately identifiable originals of any fictive character. However, his companion and friend. Father Machebeuf, who was to become Willa Gather's Father Vaillant, is even more directly identifiable, since Gather read, in 1925, Father W. J. Hewlett's Life of the Right Reverend Joseph R Machebeuf, Pioneer Priest of Ohio, Pioneer Priest of New