SOURCE: “Cather's Mortal Comedy,” in Queen's Quarterly, Vol. LXXIII, No. 2, Summer, 1966, pp. 244-59.

In the following essay, Stewart argues that Cather borrowed heavily from Puvis de Chavannes's series of frescoes of the life of Saint Genevieve and Holbein's “Dance of Death” woodcuts in her composition of Death Comes for the Archbishop.

The importance of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop is that it is one of the most elaborately contrived novels ever fashioned by an American, rivalling in artistic allusiveness Eliot's Wasteland and in technical complexity Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! So adroit had she become, however, in the practice of her much publicized “démeublé form” that she could use it as mere façade. Behind its plain face she built, as it were, a complicated cathedral into which busy critics of her time and ours seldom glance. That this novel has become standard high school fare is...