Cather first conceived Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1912, during a visit to the American Southwest. She had set previous fiction in the region, including the 1909 story "The Enchanted Bluff" and portions of the novels My Ántonia, Song of the Lark, and The Professor's House.
Cather preferred to call Death Comes for the Archbishop a "narrative" rather than a novel. Indeed, the book does not conform to traditional notions of the novel form. Instead, Cather layers vignettes from the lives of her protagonists to build a quiet study of nineteenth-century New Mexico and the religious faith that transformed the peoples of the region.
Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop following two contemporary novels, A Lost Lady and The Professor's House, as well as a novella, My Mortal Enemy. The preceding fiction reveals Cather's perception of the increasing materialism of American society and disillusion with Jazz Age lapses of morality. Similar to other such Modernist writers as T.S. Eliot and David Jones, Cather perceived that "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," as she wrote in the preface to her 1936 collection of essays Not Under Forty. In another similarity to Eliot and Jones, Cather attempted to counter the relaxed morality of the era through religious faith. Raised Baptist, she converted to the Episcopalian church. It is the belief of some critics that Cather stopped short of converting to Roman Catholicism due to her Protestant roots. Nevertheless, Death Comes for the Archbishop reveals Cather's appreciation for Catholic rituals, self-discipline, and symbolism.
