Overview
WINNER OF THE PEN/MARTHA ALBRAND AWARD FOR FIRST NONFICTION
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ATLANTIC AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
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; 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
desire to reconcile the claims of faith and art. A friend came up with a name for them—the School of the Holy Ghost.
The 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—
through 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.
With 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.
This book title, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (An American Pilgrimage), ISBN: 9781250399144, by Paul Elie, published by Picador (May 27, 2025) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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