In the light of Thomas Merton's primary allegiance to the monastic life, one feels somewhat perplexed by his prodigious publication record. Merton was born in Prades, France, 31 January 1915, the son of two artists, Owen Heathcote Merton, a New...

Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Roman Catholic writer, was a Trappist monk, social critic, and spiritual guide. Thomas Merton was born in Prades, France, on January 31, 1915, the first-born child of an American mother, born Ruth Jenkins, and a New...

MERTON, THOMAS (1915–1968), Roman Catholic monk, author, and poet. Merton pursued a career that may be divided into three distinct phases: secular, monastic, and public. The secular career encompasses the first twenty-six years of his life and...

One of the most highly acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, Thomas Merton is best known in literary circles for his autobiographical novel of religious conversion, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948. In the same decade, Merton became a...

Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was one of the most influential Catholic authors of the 20th century. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, in the American state of Kentucky, Merton was an acclaimed Catholic...

Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision. By Lawrence S. Cunningham. Library of Religious Biography. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. xii + 228 pp. $16.00 (paper). More than fifty volumes by and about Thomas Merton occupy two shelves in the Merton Corner of my...

Thomas Merton: Essential Writings. Edited by Christine M. Bochen. Modern Spiritual Masters Series. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2000. 191 pp. $14.00 (paper). In her preface to this fine anthology, the editor, Christine Bochen, acknowledges that three other anthologies of Thomas Merton's writings are...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

A problem with [My Argument With the Gestapo] is its static and unresolved quality, a problem which no one appears to have been more aware of than Merton himself. He admitted that there was in fact "no action" in the book…. There is surface movement throughout …, from the periphery of the war to its vortex, and from the present to the past—but the characters and the underlying situation remain essentially the same, whatever the superficial changes in nationality and locale...

[Merton's] last poem, The Geography of Lograire, is, in his own words, a "wide angle mosaic" on the violence, intolerance and alienation of Western man. In scope and form The Geography of Lograire owes much to the attempt at a modern American epic. Like Crane's The Bridge, it is structured on a compass motif, ranging from South to North, East to West, through past and present, mixing history with personal experience. Like Pound's Cantos, Lograire employs fantastic eruditio...

Provides a biography of Thomas Merton, one of the most well known America Roman Catholics of the 20th century. Discusses many of his radical ideas and his committment to non-violence.