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Read Death Comes for the Archbishop in Englishwith every sentence explained
Willa Cather · 1927
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About the book
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather was first published in 1927. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 69,600 words.
Two French priests. A desert the size of Europe. A lifetime of faith on horseback.
In 1851, soon after New Mexico has become part of the United States, a young French priest, Jean Marie Latour, is sent to take charge of a vast new diocese. He arrives after a year of hard travel to find that the local clergy have never heard of him and have no wish to obey him.
With his loyal friend Father Joseph Vaillant, cheerful and tireless where Latour is quiet and refined, he sets out across mesas, canyons and deserts on muleback, visiting Mexican villages and Native American pueblos, facing storms, thirst, stubborn priests and the slow work of winning trust.
Told in calm, glowing episodes rather than one tight plot, Death Comes for the Archbishop is Willa Cather's masterpiece and a classic of the American Southwest, listed among TIME's 100 best novels.
- Author
- Willa Cather
- First published
- 1927
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 69,600 words
How it opens
ONE summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden in which the four men sat at table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of rock, overhanging a steep declivity planted with vineyards. A flight of stone steps connected it with the promenade above.
Reading Death Comes for the Archbishop in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
