The typical article about James Farl Powers (1917–1999) asks why he is so little remembered. This may at first seem counterintuitive. Powers was a recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller grants, resident at the celebrated Yaddo writers’ colony, friends with Robert “Cal” Lowell, admired by Evelyn Waugh and Sean O’Faolain. He wrote perfectly crafted short stories, and in 1963 won the National Book Award for his masterpiece (and first novel), Morte D’Urban. And yet Powers always hovers just beyond the first- and second-class ranks of American novelists.
From very early in his life, Powers made clear he was a writer, and would seek no paying job that would detract him from his mission.
Powers’s universe was the Catholic life in what he called “big Missal country.” This was the German and Irish Catholicism of places like Minnesota—where Powers lived for a time and whose religious life impressed him deeply—and Illinois—where he was born to a devoutly Catholic family. But Powers had an even more parochial—pardon the pun—literary universe. He wrote mostly about Midwestern priests as they managed the secular demands on their time and vocation. Morte D’Urban, for example, is about a priest of the (fictitious) Clementine order, whose “history revealed little to brag about—one saint (the Holy Founder) and a few bishops of missionary sees, no theologians worthy of the name, no original thinkers, not even a scientist. The Clementines were unique in that they were noted for nothing at