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

nWINNER OF THE PEN/MARTHA ALBRAND AWARD FOR FIRST NONFICTION nFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY nNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ATLANTIC AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE n nThomas 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; and Walker Percy a doctor in Louisiana who had quit medicine in order to write. Although they never met as a group, for three decades they read one another's work, corresponded, and grappled with what Percy called a predicament shared in common their ndesire to reconcile the claims of faith and art. A friend came up with a name for them--the School of the Holy Ghost. n nThe Life You Save May Be Your Own is Paul Elie's now-classic group portrait of these four writers and the artistic and religious milieu they made their own. It is a riveting history of America's first Catholic literary moment--as the four go on pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the chaos of postwar American life. It is a narrative of the ways faith took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated-- nthrough memoir and modernist fiction, in soup kitchens and street protests. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience. n nWith a new afterword by the author, The Life You Save May Be Your Own demonstrates the power of great writing to change--and save--our lives.n