Our conference concerns the novel and the moral imagination. Willa Cather's 1927 masterpiece,

Death Comes for the Archbishop, is regularly called a novel, but critics greeted its first

publication with great perplexity as to its genre. Borrowing expectations from the world of drama,

novelists and their readers then generally considered linear sequence

and aesthetic unity as givens for the novel.

Death comes for the Archbishop is marked instead,

as Guy Reynolds observes by a discontinuous storyline, discrete tableau,

and anecdotes, interpolated legends, historical asides, and a lack of dynamic plot or

taught structure. Set in 19th century New Mexico shortly after the acquisition of that territory by the United States,

but extending into Mexico, Arizona, and Denver, it chronicles the missionary journeys of two French priests,

Father Jean Latour and Father Joseph Valand, from their young manhood until their funerals.

The main characters periodically disappear from sight, going their separate ways or playing

the parts of listeners as other characters and their legendary stories, one by one, come

to the four, forming a colorful episodic array.

Cather's novel is really a sort of anti-novel and consciously intended as such.

Cather seems to have done the impossible and at least two scores, topical and formal.

Edwin Mier finds only a tincture of religious feeling left in modern Chronicles fiction,

but Cather wrote a religious and audaciously Catholic novel in a secular progressive age.

As Reynolds observes, when Christianity was written about,

it was the object of satire, not celebration.

Sinclair Lewis's biting portrayal of a fraudulent evangelist,

Elmer Gantry, 1927, was a bestseller in the same year Cather's own Christian novel was published.

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