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

Author:	Elie, Paul
Binding:	Paperback
List Price:	$24.00
Our Price:	$4.25 USD
Qty Avail:	88

Additional Info
Overview

ISBN:	9781250399144
Publisher:	Picador
Language:	English
Page Count:	555
Publication Date:	5/27/2025
Size:	8.25" l x 5.50" w x 1.00"
Series:	N/A

Category	Subject
Biography & Autobiography	Religious
Religion & Spirituality	Christianity - General

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God

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. 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.