June (Web-only) 2003

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Novelist Caroline Gordon once linked the writings and beliefs of like-minded Catholic writers Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy by dubbing them the "Holy Ghost school." Author Paul Elie further connects the four authors, who he says are joined by craft and faith, in his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.)

He calls Merton, Day, O'Connor, and Percy "Catholics of rare sophistication who overcame the narrowness of the church and the suspicions of the culture to achieve a distinctly American Catholic outlook."

How did you get personally connected to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy?

I was born in 1965 and raised in a Catholic family in upstate New York. It wasn't until I came to college, at Fordham in New York, that I self-consciously examined the Christian tradition to figure out my place in it. That was possibly because I already wanted to be a writer. In addition to all the books I was reading in college, I turned to the books by these four writers.

Flannery O'Connor came first. I bought the complete stories and found out that she had a connection with Thomas Merton through her editor, Robert Giroux. He said both of them were characterized by deep faith, great intelligence, and a highly developed sense of comedy. So having read that Giroux said that, I bounced over to Merton and read The Seven Storey Mountain.

At the time, I worshiped at the Corpus Christi Church up near Columbia University. It's a church best known for being the church where Thomas Merton was baptized in 1938. Anyway, they had a book sale in the basement one day after Mass, and I brought a selection of Dorothy Day's writings.

I ...