Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cather at her most matter-of-fact and, as a consequence, her most powerful. She based this book on the life of Bishop Jean Baptiste L’Amy — she calls him Father Latour — the French-born Ohio cleric who was assigned by the church to rebuild the faith in New Mexico after the territory was annexed by the U.S. in 1831. With an old friend, Father Vaillant, Latour sets out for Santa Fe. He will find the church there to be fragmented and corrupt, with priests taking wives and charging exorbitant fees to perform marriages. Latour embarks on a decades-long effort to reform and reinvigorate the diocese. The style and structure of this book are strange, unemphatic, as if Cather had simply laid the scenes side by side in a tapestry. She compared the book to a legend, in which no event is given much dramatic weight. If this sounds like a formula for boredom, it’s not. Her serene language, with its immemorial simplicity, gives the story a weight mere drama could never provide.
A - B
- The Adventures of Augie March
- All the King's Men
- American Pastoral
- An American Tragedy
- Animal Farm
- Appointment in Samarra
- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
- The Assistant
- At Swim-Two-Birds
- Atonement
- Beloved
- The Berlin Stories
- The Big Sleep
- The Blind Assassin
- Blood Meridian
- Brideshead Revisited
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
C - D
- Call It Sleep
- Catch-22
- The Catcher in the Rye
- A Clockwork Orange
- The Confessions of Nat Turner
- The Corrections
- The Crying of Lot 49
- A Dance to the Music of Time
- The Day of the Locust
- Death Comes for the Archbishop
- A Death in the Family
- The Death of the Heart
- Deliverance
- Dog Soldiers
F - G
- Falconer
- The French Lieutenant's Woman
- The Golden Notebook
- Go Tell it on the Mountain
- Gone With the Wind
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Gravity's Rainbow
- The Great Gatsby
H - I
- A Handful of Dust
- The Heart is A Lonely Hunter
- The Heart of the Matter
- Herzog
- Housekeeping
- A House for Mr. Biswas
- I, Claudius
- Infinite Jest
- Invisible Man
L - N
O - R
- On the Road
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- The Painted Bird
- Pale Fire
- A Passage to India
- Play It As It Lays
- Portnoy's Complaint
- Possession
- The Power and the Glory
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- Rabbit, Run
- Ragtime
- The Recognitions
- Red Harvest
- Revolutionary Road
S - T
- The Sheltering Sky
- Slaughterhouse Five
- Snow Crash
- The Sot-Weed Factor
- The Sound and the Fury
- The Sportswriter
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
- The Sun Also Rises
- Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Things Fall Apart
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- To the Lighthouse
- Tropic of Cancer
Sections
