Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American novelist born in Virginia and raised from the age of nine in Red Cloud, Nebraska, among immigrant farming families. After working as a journalist, teacher and managing editor of McClure's Magazine, she wrote novels celebrating the prairie and the Southwest, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Ántonia, the Pulitzer-winning One of Ours and Death Comes for the Archbishop.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
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