SOURCE: “Willa Cather's Archbishop: A Western and Classical Perspective,” in Western American Literature, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Summer, 1978, pp. 141-50.

In the following essay, Murphy maintains that Cather's view of history in Death Comes for the Archbishop is “cyclical” in that the heroic archetypes of the American West repeat those of the classical literature of Europe and ancient Greece.

The hero rather than setting or situation is the main thing in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Willa Cather admitted that for a long time she had no intention of writing the novel: “the story of the Church and the Spanish missionaries was always what most interested me; but I hadn't the most remote idea of trying to write about it.”¹ What changed her mind were stories she had heard about Archbishop Lamy of Santa Fe and her discovery of Howlett's biography of Bishop Machebeuf. She was intrigued by the...