The Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez

A New Mexico Renaissance Man

Ellen McCracken

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780826347626
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association

As a teenager, Manuel Chávez (1910-1996) left his native New Mexico for over a decade of study at the St. Francis Seraphic Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and other midwestern institutions. Included in his curriculum was an introduction to literature and the arts that piqued an interest that would follow him the remainder of his life. Upon returning to New Mexico, he was ordained Fray Angélico Chávez and would become one of New Mexico's most important twentieth-century writers.

In The Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez, Ellen McCracken provides a literary biography that includes a deep look into the intellectual and cultural contributions of this Renaissance man. McCracken moves chronologically through a substantial body of work that includes fiction, poetry, plays, essays, spiritual tracts, sermons, historical writing, translation, painting, church renovation, and journalism.

From the prolific creativity of the years of his first assignment in Peña Blanca to the decades he spent researching Hispano genealogy in New Mexico, McCracken traces Chávez's complex and changing identity as an ethnic American and religious subject who was also an historian, artist, creative writer, and preservationist. The year 2010 will mark the centenary of Fray Angélico Chávez's birth, and this volume will serve as a fitting tribute.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: A Life’s Trajectory
• Chapter Two: Hybrid Identity in the Early Cultural Production
• Chapter Three: The Young Mission Padre and the Kaleidoscope of Culture
• Chapter Four: Padre in the Pacific: Art in the Face of Death in World War II and Beyond
• Chapter Five: Re-envisioning History: Hispano-Franciscan Identity, Documentary Recovery, and the Creative Impulse
• Chapter Six: Hispano Genealogy, La Conquistadora, and the Penitentes: Revisionist History
• Chapter Seven: The Historian’s Return to Art and Literature
• Chapter Eight: The Renaissance Man as Public Intellectual
• Chapter Nine: Twilight of the Historian: Vindicating Hispano Clergy
• Notes
• Note on Sources
• Index