SOURCE: “Cather's New World Divine Comedy: The Dante Connection,” in Cather Studies, Vol. 1, 1990, pp. 21-35.

In the following essay, Murphy argues that Death Comes for the Archbishop is Cather's deliberate attempt to create a twentieth-century Divine Comedy.

More than twenty years ago, in his insightful essay “Cather's Mortal Comedy,” D. H. Stewart analyzed Death Comes for the Archbishop as a truncated Divine Comedy structured around the seven virtues and their corresponding vices and crowned at the end by the “Beatific Vision” of Latour's last thoughts. Although his analysis is forced in places, Stewart succeeds in making a case for Dante as a possible Cather “influence” and indicates references to him in her writing. In Cather's essay “Escapism,” Dante is among the great men she wishes to rescue from the “iconoclasts and tomb-breakers” of this century, who dispose of him “because he was a cryptogram and did not at...