The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New WritersIn the middle of the last century, a Trappist monk, a Greenwich Village bohemian, a melancholy doctor who abandoned medicine to write, and a young, chronically ill southern woman defined a unique moment in American Catholic intellectual life. Dubbed jokingly “the School of the Holy Ghost,” Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor differed in almost every conceivable way but one: They all approached literature as a religious experience, infusing their writing with the struggle for faith in the modern world.

Elie’s book may look daunting, but broken down into bite-sized chunks, it promises great rewards as he entwines the lives of these four unique souls. Merton, who spent most of his adult life at a monastery, is best known for The Seven Storey Mountain. Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, lived with the poor, and worked tirelessly for social justice. Percy won the National Book Award for his novel The Moviegoer; and O’Connor, an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, lived with her family until her death at 39.

Individually, they lived outside traditional literary circles, and their interaction was limited. But Elie’s research reveals both their awareness of each other’s work and their shared concerns, and his considerable talent as a writer and deep affection for his subjects animates the lives of these writer-pilgrims convincingly, breathing new life into their work.
(Spring 2003 Selection)