On Thomas Merton

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."