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Morte D'Urban
by Powers, J. F.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1962. SIGNED / INSCRIBED by author J.F. POWERS. Cloth hardcover with light scuffing abrasions wear else good binding sound; dust jacket as-is condition with edge tears and wear ; light stain bottom edge ; else as-is intact Price of $4.50 on the front flap of the dust jacket. Winner of the National Book Award.
The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation as a speaker on the religious circuit and has big plans for the future. But then the provincial head of his dowdy religious order banishes him to a retreat house in the Minnesota hinterlands. Father Urban soon bounces back, carrying God's word with undaunted enthusiasm through the golf courses, fishing lodges, and backyard barbecues of his new turf. Yet even as he triumphs his tribulations mount, and in the end his greatest success proves a setback from which he cannot recover.
First published in 1962, Morte D'Urban has been praised by writers as various as Gore Vidal, William Gass, Mary Gordon, and Philip Roth. This beautifully observed, often hilarious tale of a most unlikely Knight of Faith is among the finest achievements of an author whose singular vision assures him a permanent place in American literature.
Morte d'Urban is the debut novel of J. F. Powers. It was published by Doubleday in 1962. It won the 1963 National Book Award. It is still in print, having been reissued by The New York Review of Books in 2000.
The novel tells the story of Father Urban Roche, a member of a fictitious religious order named the Clementines. Fr. Urban has developed a reputation as a gifted public speaker, but is sent by the superior to a remote retreat house in rural Minnesota. There he puts his skills to work improving the facilities and the local church.
The book has been widely praised. Thomas Merton called it “a valid and penetrating study of the psychology of a priest in what is essentially a spiritual conflict.” Jonathan Yardley, in a consideration of the book in the Washington Post four decades later, praised it as “our great workplace saga,” comparing it favorably to Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, calling it “subtler, wittier and much more elegantly written.”