In 1931, three years after the publication of Mrs Dalloway, the Modern Library reprinted Willa Cather's bestseller, Death Comes for the Archbishop. For Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, this was a victory after years of unsuccessful attempts to include Cather titles in their series. However, Archbishop stayed only five years in the Modern Library. At Cather's insistence, Alfred Knopf, the original publisher, refused to renew the contract, and Cerf and Klopfer had to drop the novel from their list. While Sharon O'Brien has argued that ‘Willa Cather possessed canonical status during the 1920s only to lose it in the 1930s’, this chapter contends that some of Cather's works became canonical in the early 1930s – when these texts were included in cheap series of reprints such as the Modern Library and Houghton Mifflin's Riverside Library, and marketed to a large audience of students and their professors. As John Guillory puts it, ‘canonicity is a function of the reproduction of a work over time, and the market for such reproduction is the school’. The canonicity of Archbishop and other Cather titles was indeed the product of the education system (the principal canon maker for Guillory) but also of reprint series, which made these titles easily available to the school market. At the time when the study of American literature was being institutionalized in universities, many instructors selected the inexpensive editions of Cather titles for classroom use.