Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Johan Christian Dahl, Gustave Courbet and George Catlin. A French bishop and his vicar spend forty years building a cathedral in the New Mexico desert among Hopi, Navajo and Mexican parishioners. Cather called it a narrative rather than a novel and modelled it on the flat gold of medieval saints' legends; many readers think it her best. This edition is bound with a gallery of 58 plates of painting from 1780 to 1909, among them works by Frederic Remington, George Catlin and Winslow Homer.