SOURCE: “The Genesis of Death Comes for the Archbishop,” in American Literature, 26, No. 4 (January 1955): 479-506.

In the following essay, the Blooms examine factors that went into Cather's writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop, particularly her wish to recreate in fiction the tradition and style of medieval saints' legends that appear in writing and painting.

For Willa Cather as for Henri Bergson, whom she admired, literary creation—that is, the choice of subject matter and the technique enforced by it—was an “intuitive” rather than an “intellectual” process. When the novelist, according to Miss Cather, deals with material that is deeply a part of his conscious and subconscious being, he has “less and less power of choice about the moulding of it. It seems to be there of itself, already moulded. If he tries to meddle with its vague outline, to twist it into some categorical shape, above...