SOURCE: “Business as an Artist,” New York Herald Tribune Books, September 11, 1927, pp. 1, 5-6.

In the following review, West contrasts Cather's simple yet evocative story-telling with the more complicated modes of modernist writers such as James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, finding Cather's writing in Death Comes for the Archbishop a great artistic accomplishment.

The most sensuous of writers. Willa Cather, builds her imagined world as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us. This account of the activities of a French priest who was given a diocese in the Southwest during the late '40s impresses one first of all by its amazing sensory achievements. Miss Cather has within herself a sensitivity that constantly presents her with a body of material which would overwhelm most of us, so that we would give up all idea of transmitting it and would sink into a state of passivity...