SOURCE: “Southwest Classics Reread: Death Comes for the Archbishop,” in New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, Winter, 1966-67, pp. 389-403.

In the following essay, Powell discusses his impressions of Death Comes for the Archbishop upon rereading it after twenty years.

Twenty years had passed since I last read Death Comes for the Archbishop. The question was, on rereading would I rank it as high now as I did then? That's the risk one takes. Tastes and standards change—or should. Life appears differently at sixty-five than it did at forty-five. Therefore I didn't hurry. I began by reading Willa Cather's other books and the biographies and memoirs that have appeared since her death in 1947.

Then at the last, with everything else read, I came to the Archbishop. This time I brought to it two decades of familiarity with the Southwest—its landscape and literature; its culture, historical and...