The Seven Storey Mountain!

Re-reading a Catholic classic

Our book today is a classic of Catholic literature, The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton, an autobiography written by him in the late 1940s when he was in his late 20s and published in 1948, after Merton had become a Trappist monk and entered an abbey in Kentucky. The book became a runaway hit, which might have been a bit mortifying to a man who'd taken a vow of voluntary poverty, but it's been reprinted many, many times in the ensuing decades.