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

"In the middle of the twentieth century, four American Catholics, working independently of one another, came to believe that the best way to explore the quandaries of religious faith was in writing - 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 foundress of the Catholic Worker movement and its penny newspaper in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-centered" 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 four writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-possessed 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 their readers could not have anticipated.