Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.

Willa Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1873. When she was ten years old, her family moved to the prairies of Nebraska, later the setting for a number of her novels. At the age of twenty-one she graduated from the University of Nebraska and spent the next few years doing newspaper work and teaching high school in Pittsburgh. In 1903 her first book, April Twilights, a collection of poems, was published, and two years later The Troll Garden, a collection of stories, appeared in print. After the publication of her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, in 1912, Cather devoted herself fulltime to writing, and, over the years, completed eleven more novels (including O Pioneers!, My Antonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop), four collections of short stories, and two volumes of essays. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in 1923. She died in 1947.