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

A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year: “A fascinating multiple biography of four of the most influential Catholic literary figures of the 20th century.” —Booklist

Winner, PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction * Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award * An Atlantic Monthly Book of the Year * A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year * A San Jose Mercury News Top Book of the Year

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker movement 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. In the mid-twentieth century, these 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. 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.

“Reminds us of what it means to live authentically in a world that seems determined to dull our senses and our intellect and our spirits with doublespeak, nonsense, meaningless distraction.” —Alice McDermott, Commonweal

“Lucid, humane, poignant, and wise. As a work of the spirit, it is universal and in no way sectarian.” —Harold Bloom

“[An] engrossing, smartly conceived and perfectly realized work.” —Tom Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle

“An elegant, intelligent blend of biography and literary criticism.” —Ben Lytal, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

© 2024 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Ebook): 9781429923958

Release date

Ebook: 4 June 2024