Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

The novel’s inception was at once prolonged and sudden. In 1909, Cather published a story in Harper’s Magazine, “The Enchanted Bluff,” about Nebraska children (as she had been herself) who imagine climbing a New Mexico mesa to find Indian ruins. In 1912, she visited her brother Douglass in the Southwest, where he was then working, and made subsequent trips in 1914, 1915, and 1916, well before the journeys in 1925 and 1926 that sparked Death Comes for the Archbishop. Melissa J. Homestead, in her book The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather & Edith Lewis, notes that Lewis accompanied Cather for all but the first two visits. Lewis records in her memoir Willa Cather Living that, in 1925, they stopped first in Santa Fe: “There, in a single evening, as she often said, the idea…came to her, essentially as she afterwards wrote it. From that time on it completely took possession of her, filled all her waking thoughts.”