Elie, Paul. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: an American Pilgrimage. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
What do Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy have in common? For starters, they are all authors who struggled not only with identity, but religious faith as well. It’s this search for religious truth through writing that binds them together. They conducted their searches and tested boundaries of Catholicism through the art of writing. Mary Flannery O’Connor began her writing career in Georgia at a very young age and was considered a prodigy by many: Thomas Merton, just a couple of states north in Kentucky began his writing as a Trappist monk who wrote letters about his faith: Dorothy Day, while older than all the others, founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in New York: Walker Percy started out as a doctor in the furthest south of them all, in New Orleans, but quit medicine to become novelist. In time the group became known as the School of the Holy Ghost because of their pursuit of the answers to religion’s biggest questions. Paul Elie brings that School of the Holy Ghost back together again in a 2003 book called The Life You Save May Be Your Own containing biographies and literary criticisms of all four writers. Elie does a great job detailing all four lives and the times they lived in, but is more thorough with the women than the men. Flannery O’Connor gets the most attention while Thomas Merton gets the least.
I didn’t find any quotes that really spoke up or out, but my favorite part was Elie’s breakdown of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. I am almost tempted to read it again now that I have a better understanding of Percy and what he was trying to say.
BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Group Portraits” (p 109).
~*LunaSea*~ 