The life you save may be your own : an American pilgrimage

Elie, Paul 1965- (Author).

Summary: In 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. This book 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, read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common." In this book 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.

Record details

ISBN: 9780374529215
ISBN: 0374529213
ISBN: 1429923954
ISBN: 9781429923958
Physical Description: 1 online resource (xiii, 554 pages) : illustrations
remote
Edition: First paperback edition.
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2004, 2003]
Copyright: ©2003

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 475-534) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Prologue : on pilgrimage -- Experience -- The downward path -- Seeking the real -- Another world -- Independents -- The school of the Holy Ghost -- The stranger -- Counterparts -- Convergences -- Pilgrimage or crusade? -- The holiness of the ordinary -- The life you save may be your own.
Source of Description Note:	Print version record.