Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 - December 10, 1968) was an American author, born in Prades in the Pyrénées-Orientales departement of Franceto an American mother and a New Zealander father who was an artist. Merton wrote more than 50 books, 2000 poems, and a countless number of essays, reviews, and lectures that have been recorded and published.

Merton was educated in the United States and France before attending Oakham School in England. His mother died when he was six and his father when he was sixteen. After a disastrous first year at Cambridge University, during which time he fathered an illegitimate child, Merton moved to the United States to live with his grandparents. He proceeded to take his first degree and masters at Columbia University in New York City, where he made friends with a group of artists and writers who would remain his friends for life.

Merton converted to Christianity and Catholicism in his early twenties during the period he was writing his masters on William Blake. His desire to enter the Franciscans being thwarted, he taught at Bonaventure College, in Olean, New York and, following a retreat at the Trappist (Cistercian) Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky during Easter 1941, he came to a crisis with call up looming and was finally accepted as a choir novice (with the intention of becoming a priest) at Gethsemani on December 10th 1941.

During his long years at Gethsemani (where he was encouraged to write) Merton changed from the passionately inward-looking young monk of his most famous book, the autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, to a contemplative writer and poet who became well known for his dialogue with other faiths and his stand on non-violence during the race riots and Vietnam War of the 1960s, and finally achieved the solitude in a hermitage he had long desired in 1965. During these years he had many battles with his abbot about not being allowed out of the monastery, balanced by his international reputation and huge correspondence with many well-known figures of the day.

A new abbot allowed him the freedom to undertake a tour of Asia at the end of 1968, during which he memorably met the Dalai Lama in India. He died in Bangkok on 10th December 1968 (from touching a badly-grounded electric fan while stepping out of his bath), shortly after a visit to Polanaruwa in what was then Ceylon, where he had a religious experience when viewing enormous statues of the Buddha, and his body was flown back to Gethsemani where he is buried. Since his death his influence has continued to grow and he is considered by many to be a twentieth century American mystic.

Merton put a ban on publishing much of his work until 25 years after his death.

Selected Bibliography

A Man in the Divided Sea, 1946
The Seven Story Mountain, 1948
Waters of Siloe, 1949
Seeds of Contemplation, 1949
Ascent to Truth, 1951
Bread in the Wilderness, 1953
The Last of the Fathers, 1954
The Living Bread, 1956
The Silent Life, 1957
Thoughts in Solitude, 1958
The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, 1959
Disputed Questions, 1960
The New Man, 1961
New Seeds of Contemplation, 1962
Emblems of a Season of Fury, 1963
Life and Holiness, 1963
Seeds of Destruction, 1965
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966
Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966
Mystics and Zen Masters, 1967
Faith and Violence, 1968
My Argument with the Gestapo, 1969
No Man is an Island, 1978