What do Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy have in common? For starters, they are all authors who struggled not only with identity, but religious faith as well. It's this search for religious truth through writing that binds them together. They conducted their searches and tested boundaries of Catholicism through the art of writing. Mary Flannery O'Connor began her writing career in Georgia at a very young age and was considered a prodigy by many: Thomas Merton, just a couple of states north in Kentucky began his writing as a Trappist monk who wrote letters about his faith: Dorothy Day, while older than all the others, founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in New York: Walker Percy started out as a doctor in the furthest south of them all, in New Orleans, but quit medicine to become novelist. In time the group became known as the School of the Holy Ghost because of their pursuit of the answers to religion's biggest questions. Paul Elie brings that School of the Holy Ghost back together again in a 2003 book called The Life You Save May Be Your Own containing biographies and literary criticisms of all four writers. ( )

Elie's ambitious effort tells the story of the post-war American Catholic Church through the eyes of four of its foundational writers. Elie's prose effortlessly integrates and synthesizes themes and feelings across his four figures to give the reader a sense of their likenesses and differences. ( )

This is a fascinating book that acts as a quadruple biography for four American Catholics - Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor. All four are tied together not just by their faith but by the ways in which they write about Catholicism in a distinctly American way. Even though the four subjects didn't really associate together much beyond correspondence, Elie masterfully ties together their parallel pilgrimages into one coherent narrative. Interestingly, only O'Connor was born Catholic, and the conversion stories and reasons for conversion for Merton, Percy, and Day are fascinating and surprising. This is one of the most inspirational and just plain good books I've read in some time.

Kimberly Burge wrote an excellent review of this book in an article for Sojourners called 'Christ-Haunted' Journeys

Favorite Passages
Peter Maurin’s “Easy Essays”

“The world would be better off

if people tried to become better.

And people would become better

if they stopped trying to become

better off

For when everybody tries to

become better off,

nobody is better off.

But when everybody tries to

become better, everybody is better off.

Everybody would be rich

if nobody tried to become richer.

And nobody would be poor

if everybody tried to be poorest.

And everybody would be

what he ought to be

if everybody tried to be

what he wants the other fellow to be.” – footnote on p. 72

“Percy’s point – in the language of pilgrimage – is that the modern predicament makes pilgrimage impossible. In the modern world (now generally called postmodern), all experience is always secondhand, planned and described for one’s consumption by others in advance. Even the rare authentically direct experience is spoiled by modern self-consciousness. The modern person is doomed to an imitation of life; the self cannot escape itself and know the world or the Other.

The self can try, however. That is Percy’s real point.” – p. 278

“O’Connor had regarded Christianity as a timeless truth, Merton as a quandary forever unfolding. Percy had come to see it as something akin to his Uncle Will’s ideal of the Old South: ancient, noble, run-down, disrespected, clearly flawed and yet worth cherishing while it was still around.” P. 428 ( )

An astounding work that masterfully weaves the lives of four remarkable literary and religious figures in contemporary America. Elie is a terrific writer who's created a real "page turner" out of a subject and in a genre where such is unexpected. While not Catholic, I was somewhat familiar with Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Flannery O'Connor (though not Walker Percy) and their respective writings. But Elie describes their lives with such wonderful detail and insight - the book is obviously thoroughly researched - that his narrative left me seeing each of these "giants" as both more human and more gigantic than ever before. This is one of the best books I read in 2007, if not all time. ( )

3793. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Edie (read 1 Sept 2004) This book was selected to be read in the old, pre-computer, way: I saw it on the library's new books shelf. I at once decided to read it and it turned out to be one of the best books read this year. It could be called a "quadruple" biography, being an account of the work of Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Dorothy Day (1897-1980), and Walker Percy (1916-1990). The book tells superlatively of the careers of all four, and I was edified greatly. One of the most enjoyable books read this year. ( )