Garrett Peck — The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop
Historian Garrett Peck traces Willa Cather's Southwest adventures that inspired her masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Date & Time at 7:00 PM EDT
Location Politics and Prose at Connecticut Avenue Washington, US
Organizer Politics and Prose
Why we picked this
Cather's Archbishop is one of those novels people call perfect without being able to explain why. Peck's book traces the actual landscape and encounters that gave it that quality.
Garrett Peck follows Willa Cather’s journeys through the American Southwest that became the raw material for Death Comes for the Archbishop, her 1927 novel about a French priest building a diocese in the New Mexico Territory. The book traces how Cather transformed real places, people, and historical events into one of the most admired works of American fiction.
Peck is a historian and author of several books on American history and culture. The talk explores both the literary craft and the physical geography that made the novel possible.