Saturday, August 8, 2026 at 2 PM
Author Garrett Peck will discuss his latest book, The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop (University of New Mexico Press).
Peck first visited New Mexico in 1998, and his mother suggested that he read Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. He fell in love with the Land of Enchantment and with Cather’s novel, and he moved to Santa Fe in 2021. Peck is an author, independent historian, and tour guide, and hence his book focuses on Cather’s travels as he deciphered how she wrote her novel. She visited the Southwest six times between 1912 and 1926, and from those journeys came three novels, the last of which was Death Comes for the Archbishop. The novel is beautifully written in Cather’s sparse but descriptive language and is surprisingly pro-Catholic at a time when much of the country was prejudiced against Catholicism. The novel’s chapters – a series of tableaus of the fictional Archbishop Latour’s life – are based on Cather’s own research and travels, and the many places she described are real: Acoma Pueblo, Chimayó, Taos, and the Lamy quarry that provided the ochre sandstone for the St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe.
A perennial favorite for people who love New Mexico, Cather’s novel tells an unusual story of two French priests and best friends serving on the American frontier before the arrival of the railroad. This work of fiction is loosely based on two historical figures, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Bishop Joseph Machebeuf.
Six months before she died in 1947, Cather called Archbishop her “best book.” The Atlantic magazine concurred, including Archbishop on its Great American Novels list in 2024. In The Bright Edges of the World, Peck deeply mined Cather and her partner Edith Lewis’s letters, often written on Fred Harvey company stationery, as he traced their journeys through the Southwest to write one of the twentieth century’s greatest novels and Cather’s favorite. His book is a history of that “best book,” and he uncovered gems such as Cather meeting the German shepherd and Hollywood star Rin-Tin-Tin at the Albuquerque train station in 1926. Copies of Peck’s book will be available for purchase and signing at the event.