SOURCE: “Bishop Latour and Professor St. Peter: Cather's Esthetic Intellectuals,” in The Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 61-70.

In the following essay, Doane outlines ways in which Bishop Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop is similar to Godfrey St. Peter in Cather's novel The Professor's House.

Willa Cather's The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop appear to have little in common: Godfrey St. Peter is oppressed by a family and society he perceives to be excessively materialistic, while Bishop Latour works to bring Catholicism to the Southwest. In form, too, the books appear to share little: Bishop Latour's “narrative”¹ is a “loosely episodic”² travelogue;³ St. Peter mentally escapes in an inset to the ancient Cliff City of higher values. Despite these differences in form and subject matter, the central characters of the two books are remarkably similar: both St. Peter and Bishop Latour are...