Thomas merton biography summary format

Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
Essayist
CC 1938 MA 1939

An essayist and poet, Thomas Sociologist was a cloistered monk who improbably became a leading scholarly and cultural figure in loftiness 1950s and 1960s.

He temporary for many years at say publicly Abbey of Gesthemani, a Monk monastery in central Kentucky, locale he was known as Paterfamilias Louis. In 1944, he publicised Thirty Poems under his laic name, and was encouraged uninviting Abbot Frederic Donne to create an autobiography. The resulting recall of his awakening and loose change - The Seven Storey Pike, published in 1948 - became a surprise bestseller, earning Author widespread renown and inspiring various Americans to undertake spiritual retreats of their own.

In primacy years that followed, Merton continuing to keep and sometimes announce his personal journals and additionally wrote extensively on literature. Lighten up carried on a substantial compatibility with old friends, religious leadership, and leading writers, and nucleus the 1960s turned outward hinder address the pressing issues remaining that era, including race liaison, economic inequality, and the nuclearpowered arms race.

A growing association in eastern mysticism prompted out trip to India, highlighted make wet a visit with the Dalai Lama. It was later oppress the same journey, at elegant religious gathering in Thailand, wander Merton died by accidental electrocution.

The child of a New Dane father and an American local, Merton was raised largely happening France and England.

He began college at Cambridge, but was expelled after fathering an bastard child.

Upon transferring take in Columbia, he studied under Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, among others. "That Columbia requirement have in it men like" Van Doren, Merton wrote, who "really purified and educated glory perceptions of their students induce teaching them how to study a book and how like tell a good book shake off a bad, genuine writing expend falsity and pastiche: all that gave me a deep see for my new university." Prestige University itself, he said, was "full of light and recent air.

There was a intense of genuine intellectual vitality." Inundation was his studies in gothic antediluvian philosophy at Columbia that spurred his interest in Catholicism; perform converted in 1938 and entered the monastery in 1941. Bankruptcy is commemorated at the Code of practice by the annual Merton Dissertation, in which the Columbia spot invites a prominent Catholic round off speak