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Author photo. Thomas Merton in Pictures

From the archives of the Thomas Merton Center.
Used with permission of the Merton Legacy Trust.

Thomas Merton in Pictures From the archives of the Thomas Merton Center. Used with permission of the Merton Legacy Trust.

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Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism. After an initial education in the United States, France, and England, he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance, and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time before his death. His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948); there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world, his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by. Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander," to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms race, to racial oppression. Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968. (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from The Seven Storey Mountain… (more)
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A Hidden Wholeness/The Visual World of Thomas Merton (Photographer) 51 copies, 1 review
Counsels of Light and Love (Introduction) 48 copies
Merton & Buddhism: (The Fons Vitae Thomas Merton series) (Photographer, some editions) 32 copies
Elsewhere (Poets in the World) (Translator, some editions) 25 copies, 1 review
No more strangers (Introduction) 20 copies
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Merton [1984 film] (Featured) 10 copies
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The Analog Sea Review: Number Two (Contributor) 8 copies
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