SOURCE: “Hymn to Spiritual Beauty,” The Saturday Review of Literature, September 10, 1927, p. 101.

In the following review, Dodd offers high praise for Cather's portrayal of the priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop.

After reading Death Comes for the Archbishop, I indulged myself in a critic's day-dream; and found myself not too patiently trying to explain this book—so reticent, so distinguished, so beautiful—to a rebellious young person in very short skirts who rather petulantly had asserted that she was an incarnation of Average Public Taste in America.

“You say, my dear child, that Miss Cather's novel has bored you; that you couldn't get through it; that it isn't really a novel at all. When I ask you why it isn't really a novel, you maintain there's no story in it—by which, obviously, you mean there's no ‘love story’ in it. In this as in most things...