The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 80, July 1976 - April, 1977 Page: 2

2 Southwestern Historical Quarterly
raised from age twelve in Albuquerque, New Mexico; educated at the
New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell and at the Eastman School of
Music in Rochester, New York, he lived and wrote in New Mexico from
1926 until 1942. His first novel, which won the Harper Prize in 1933, was
set in the East; after that most of his works were written about the West.
He was stationed in Washington for almost four years during the Second
World War and returned West to work for nine years on his Pulitzer and
Bancroft prizewinner, Great River,2 a history of the Rio Grande. In 1962
he came to live in the East and has since then used both it and the West
as the locale for his many works. To southwesterners he is one of their
region's great writers, and they tend to see his non-western work as
secondary; to readers in pockets of the rest of the country-and in England
where he has a regular following-he is a man of many and sometimes
contradictory qualities whose works cover a host of genres: novel, short
story, history, biography, essay, poetry, drama, and even an opera libretto.
Horgan's latest book is a biography of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy of
Santa Fe, the man about whom Willa Cather wrote her novel Death Comes
for the Archibishop.3 It is his thirty-eighth separately published work and
it was published close to his seventy-second birthday, which was August I,
1975. The research necessary for the book was an enormous task: it began
in Santa Fe, continued in Lamy's native France, and in the archives of the
Vatican; it covered Lamy's first posts in Ohio and Kentucky, extended to
all areas of this country where Lamy's papers exist, and reached into
Mexico. In this research Horgan visited all regions of Lamy's vast diocese,
regions which the archbishop covered on horseback and which now
included all of New Mexico and Arizona and parts of Utah and Colorado.
Horgan has called the book Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times,4 and
the work reflects the influence of Lamy on Horgan's career.
Horgan remembers that when his parents first came to Albuquerque
in I914, they met people who had known Lamy. It was the affectionate
nature of their memories of Lamy, repeated to him, that Horgan has carried
with him all these years and that inspired him to persevere in this biography.
Horgan's account of Lamy records the journey of a foreigner to the land
that he adopted and in which he tried to nurture and preserve the spirit in
man. If Horgan is like Lamy it is in that they each faced a frontier they
hoped to shape by their calling. Lamy's frontier was a vast landscape and a
people who dwelled in unbelievable human richness and poverty. Horgan's
2Horgan, Great Rzver: The Rio Grande in North American History (New York, 1954).
3Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York, 1927).
4Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times (New York, 1975). Since this article