Hey, Shmooper: you're gonna die.

No, we're not threatening you, geez. Calm down. We're just stating a fact. Death doesn't just come for archbishops, you know.

In Death Comes for the Archbishop, death isn't staring us in the face on every page. But the fact that the book is titled Death Comes for the Archbishop means that the Grim Reaper is hanging out in the back of our minds as we read through this novel.

It doesn't matter how great you are or what you accomplish—we all die and the world moves on. Willa Cather was already a pretty established writer by the time she published Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, having already won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1922 novel One of Ours and gained literary superstardom for novels like My Ántonia. By the time she got around to Death Comes, She was 54 years old and no doubt wondering—like her protagonist, Father Latour—what kind of legacy she'd leave behind when she died.

Hint: she left behind a spectacular literary legacy. She's got her face on a stamp, a foundation dedicated to preserving her memory through Cather scholarship, and is in both the New York Writer's Hall of Fame and The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. Double whammy.

Willa Cather lived a pretty sweet life, to be sure. But it's nothing compared to what Archbishop John Latour goes through in Death Comes for the Archbishop. He leaves France for North America and ends up getting sent to New Mexico right after it became part of the United States. He then spends his middle-to-old age doing important work as a bishop and then archbishop: he has conflicts with corrupt priests, he builds a cathedral, and he spreads the word of Catholicism.

He also does awesome Old West stuff: rides around New Mexico on a mule, gets in good with a prominent Navajo chief, almost gets killed by bandits, and falls in love with the scenery of the American Southwest.

If Willa Cather gets to be in the New York Writer's Hall of Fame and The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, we'd nominate John Latour for the New Mexico Archbishop's Hall of Fame and the National Awesome Wild West Mule-Riding Adventurer Hall of Fame.

And yeah, the title doesn't lie. Death comes to Latour, but only after he's changed a few thousand lives, traveled a few thousand miles of Wild West desert, changed the face of New Mexican architecture and met with a bunch of weird, colorful-as-the-New-Mexico-rocks characters.

And that's not too shabby at all.

Have you ever walked through a graveyard, maybe doing crayon rubbings of tombstones on a grade-school field trip, and suddenly wondered about the life of one of the people buried? You don't know why one tombstone pops out at you, but it does. And bang: you're curious.

Or, in some sudden weird flash of curiosity, you spend a long time looking at a figure in an old portrait. Or mull over the life of the person whose name is on a park bench or memorial highway. You know you've done it.

Sometimes that weird historical curiosity just pops out at you, and you're deeply interested in the life of someone who died maybe before you were born. That's exactly what happened to Willa Cather. She got fiercely curious about the life of John-Baptiste Lamy, the first Archbishop of New Mexico. She was so fascinated with him that she wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Although she calls Lamy by the name of John Marie Latour, it's the same dude. She embellished some stuff—what fiction writer wouldn't?—but everything laid out in Death Comes for the Archbishop is pretty much what happened to Latour's real-life inspiration.

Latour's journey to New Mexico in the 1850s? Fact. His mission to replace the corrupt Mexican priests in New Mexico? Fact. His relationship with a prominent Navajo chief? Facty-fact. His friendship with notorious Wild West stereotype Kit Carson, and his plan to build the bestest cathedral in New Mexico? Yessirree Bob: true facts.

Seriously, with a life like that, who wouldn't be fascinated?

Like Latour's cathedral, Willa Cather's books are the monuments that still remain with us now that she's gone. Death Comes for the Archbishop really make us wonder sometimes if there's any consolation to be found in the idea of leaving behind a legacy when you die. After all, when you're dead, you're gone.

Unless someone in the future becomes eerily, inexplicably fascinated by your tombstone or memorial bench and writes a novel about you. It could totally happen.