On Thomas Merton

by Gordon, Mary

• ISBN13: 9781611807677
• ISBN10: 1611807670
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2020-01-07
• Publisher: Shambhala

Summary

From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings.

“If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.”

So begins acclaimed author Mary Gordon in this probing, candid exploration of the man who became the face and voice of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Approaching Merton “writer to writer,” Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction. Pope Francis has celebrated Merton as “a man of dialogue,” and here Gordon shows that the dialogue was as much internal as external—an unending conversation, and at times a heated conflict, between Merton the monk and Merton the writer.

Rich with excerpts from Merton’s own writing, On Thomas Merton produces an intimate portrait of a man who “lived life in all its imperfectability, reaching toward it in exaltation, pulling back in anguish, but insisting on the primacy of his praise as a man of God.”

Author Biography

MARY GORDON is a novelist, essayist, memoirist, literary critic, and the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is the author of many books, including Final Payments, Circling My Mother, Reading Jesus, The Shadow Man, and The Company of Women. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, an O Henry Award, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2008, Governor Eliot Spitzer named Mary Gordon the official New York State Author and gave her the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction. She was inducted as a member of the inaugural class of the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2010.