The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
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- Synopsis
- The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for GodIn the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.
- Copyright:
- 1969
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 594 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781429923958
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780374256807
- Publisher:
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Date of Addition:
- 07/04/24
- Copyrighted By:
- the Abbey of Gethsemani.
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Biographies and Memoirs, Literature and Fiction, Religion and Spirituality, Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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