From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings.
âIf 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.â
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 âwriter to writer,â Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction. Pope Francis has celebrated Merton as âa man of dialogue,â and here Gordon shows that the dialogue was as much internal as externalâan unending conversation, and at times a heated conflict, between Merton the monk and Merton the writer.
Rich with excerpts from Mertonâs own writing, On Thomas Merton produces an intimate portrait of a man who âlived 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.â
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