The Life You Save May Be Your Own

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; and Walker Percy, a doctor in Louisiana who had quit medicine in order to write. Although they never met as a group, for three decades they read one another's work, corresponded, and grappled with what Percy called a "predicament shared in common": their desire to reconcile the claims of faith and art. A friend came up with a name for them—the School of the Holy Ghost.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own is Paul Elie's now-classic group portrait of these four writers and the artistic and religious milieu they made their own. It is a riveting history of America's first Catholic literary moment—as the four go on pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the chaos of postwar American life. It is a narrative of the ways faith took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated—through memoir and modernist fiction, in soup kitchens and street protests. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience.

With a new afterword by the author, The Life You Save May Be Your Own demonstrates the power of great writing to change—and save—our lives.