He leads the Willa Cather’s Santa Fe tour, teaches stargazing, and leads many other tours.
The author of nine books about American history, Peck’s latest is The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop. The book explores Cather’s travels to the Southwest that inspired her to write her “best book” (her words), Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Peck applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Bright Edges of the World and shared the following:
Page 99 of my Willa Cather book is a half-page of text, while the other half is a 1926 image of the Santa Fe Plaza with the St. Francis Cathedral in the background. It has a large number of black Ford Model Ts along the street, a reminder how the automobile became so widespread and affordable in the 1920s. On this page I wrote about the character of Santa Fe and the prevalence of Catholicism:Visit Garrett Peck's website.Santa Fe is a deeply Catholic city. It wasn’t uncommon in the early twentieth century to see nuns and priests walking about. The Catholic Church had a significant presence downtown. St. Francis Cathedral stands a block east of the Plaza, and just to the south were two Catholic parochial schools: Our Lady of Light Academy, the girls school known to most as the Loretto Academy, and St. Michael’s College for boys.This is a pretty good measure of my book. Although Cather wasn’t Catholic, she wrote about two Catholic priests on the American frontier in the Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop, and so I wanted to create a sense of the Catholic presence in Santa Fe in my book. Cather was inundated with Catholic fan mail after the book came out in September 1927 (they are collected in a thick folder at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Libraries archive). She couldn’t respond to all these letters, so she penned an open letter to Commonweal magazine addressing their many questions about a book that she later called her “best book.” Her letter is a fabulous primary source that explained so much of what went into her novel.
My book, The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, is a history of Cather’s “best book.” As I’m a tour guide in Santa Fe, I focused on Cather’s travels to the Southwest and how much that inspired her fiction. I wrote the book conversationally to appeal to a wide range of readers, including those who want to go “a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the Archbishop,” as Cather wrote.
Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition.
Writers Read: Garrett Peck (January 2010).
The Page 99 Test: The Prohibition Hangover.
The Page 99 Test: Capital Beer.
The Page 99 Test: A Decade of Disruption.
--Marshal Zeringue