Death Comes for the Archbishop eschews most modern novelistic conventions, its form picaresque and episodic rather than building toward a single climax. Cather wrote that “I’ve always wanted to try something in the style of legend, with a sort of New Testament calm” and celebrates “working in that new form with no solid drama. I found in it a lovely kind of poverty—and richness; a deep content.…It’s a kind of writing that is colored by a kind of country, like a folk-song.” (Selected Letters)
