Death Comes for the Archbishop

Alfred A. Knopf, 1927

"Something reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by immobility, a kind of life out of reach, like the crustaceans in their armour."

Cover of first edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop

Editions

Serialization

First serialized in six installments in the Forum from January to June, 1927.

First Edition

Published by Alfred A. Knopf. on September 2, 1927.

First English Edition

Published by William Heinemann Ltd. in November 1927.

Second Edition

Published by Alfred A. Knopf on November 9, 1929.

Second English Edition

Published by William Heinemann Ltd. in May 1930.

Autograph Edition

Published by Houghton Mifflin Co. in 1938.

Fourth Edition

Armed Services edition, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1943.

Scholarly Edition

Published by University of Nebraska Press in 1999. Historical Essay and Explanatory Notes by John J. Murphy. Textual Editing by Charles W. Mignon with Frederick M. Link and Kari A. Ronning.

Related material available on the Willa Cather Archive

Interviews

Willa Cather Tells "Secret" Novel's Title

By Harold Small, published in San Francisco Chronicle on March 23, 1931 and collected by L. Brent Bohlke in Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters.

Willa Cather Raps "Sincerity Heresy"

By Harold Small, published in San Francisco Chronicle on March 29, 1931 and collected by L. Brent Bohlke in Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters.

Scholarship

As in a Mirror and a Symbolism: Pascal's Mystical Theology and Cather's Divine Geometry in Death Comes for the Archbishop

By Jean-François Leroux, Cather Studies Volume 8

Willa Cather and the Book-of-the-Month Club

By Mark J. Madigan, Cather Studies Volume 7

Biocentric, Homocentric, and Theocentric Environmentalism in O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop

By Patrick K. Dooley, Cather Studies Volume 5

Willa Cather's Great Emersonian Environmental Quartet

By Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Cather Studies Volume 5

"Something Soft and Wild and Free": Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics

By John P. Anders, Cather Studies Volume 4

Cather's Copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop

By Charles W. Mignon, Cather Studies Volume 4

The Hidden French in Willa Cather's English

By Françoise Palleau-Papin, Cather Studies Volume 4

Losing Nothing, Comprehending Everything: Learning to Read Both the Old World and the New in Death Comes for the Archbishop

By Deborah Lindsay Williams, Cather Studies Volume 4

The Ideology of Cather's Catholic Progressivism: Death Comes for the Archbishop

By Guy Reynolds, Cather Studies Volume 3

Cather's Archbishop and the "Backward Path"

By John N. Swift, Cather Studies Volume 1

Cather's New World Divine Comedy: The Dante Connection

By John J. Murphy, Cather Studies Volume 1

Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather

By Ann W. Fisher-Wirth, Cather Studies Volume 1