The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

by Paul Elie

Book Overview

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374256802
• ISBN13: 9780374256807
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 2.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Life-Saving Literary Criticism

This book is undeniably a classic of literary criticism and biography. Paul Elie gets it just right--he takes the spiritual concerns and the religiosity of the four authors very seriously while demonstrating a careful concern for the complexities and ambiguities of their faith. And he has a real knack for analyzing how all of this informs and undergirds their writings in ways that aren't necessarily straightforward and obvious. Furthermore, he accomplishes all of this in clear, jargon-free prose that is almost literary in its own right. Certainly other biographies and autobiographies of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy are out there (sorry, Barthes, "the author" is not dead), but "The Life You Save" accomplishes something a little different. Elie weaves in and out of their different lives and in so doing both suggests commonalities and similarities shared by them (the chapter titles are usually a reliable clue to these) as well as differences and contrasts that mutually highlight their characteristic particularities. Developing along these lines, later as the book progresses and our foursome become aware of each other Elie discusses their communications with each other and impressions of each other, which sheds invaluable light on all four of them and their concerns. All of this could easily fly out of hand, especially in so large and substantial a book, but Elie holds it together and keeps the story/stories flowing along together, using the metaphor of the "pilgrimage" on multiple levels as a sort of common theme smoothing out his narrative while adding meaning and significance to it. At the end, appropriately enough, the image of the pilgrimage symbolizes his own involvement with the four authors and the writing of this book itself. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the relation of literature, religion, and social history. If you take the spiritual dimension of literature seriously while knowing full well that literature is more than just a disguised form of preaching, this book will definitely be right up your alley.

A Great Gem in Catholic Literary Scholarship

The title of Paul Elie's book THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN is borrowed from a short story title of Flannery O'Connor, one of the four writers discussed in his book. The other three are Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy. The focus of Elie's work is not as much biographical as it is literary. He looks at the two things that connect these four great people: faith and writing, and shows how both work together to produce the great literary output of each author. Elie sees these four people as being part of an informal "Catholic" school of writers. Elie looks at an analyzes many of the writings of each author, and presents it in a manner that will appeal to the scholar and lay reader as well. Though the book has biographical information, and is arranged in a chronological manner, biographical and historical details are only provided where absolutely necessary to discuss the literary works of Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy.There has been a temptation to see Merton and Day as larger than life, almost saintly figures, Percy and O'Connor as eccentric southerners who happen to be Catholic, and in the case of O'Connor, a Catholic writer trying to impose blatant symbols of faith in all of her writings. Elie certainly admires all four, but shows them from a human point of view. In doing so, he debunks many of the myths surrounding these four figures. From a spiritual point of view, they are just as human as we are, and it is because of their very human struggles that their literary output is possible. Elie breaks important ground by looking at these four great Catholic figures as writers, and his work will undoubtedly set the stage for further study of the literary connections of Merton, Day, O'Connor, and Percy. His book includes copious endnotes that will enable a person to easily find works by and about these four authors. In most chapters Elie discusses each of the four, but he uses breaks after sections about each author which makes reading easier. Elie himself is a book editor and he uses his skills as an editor to write a concise work. The length of the book demonstrates this alone. The text without endnotes is approximately 475 pages. There are certainly individual works about Merton, O'Connor, and Day equal or greater in length than Elie's work, but hardly say as much. I cannot say for certain about Percy since I am not familiar with scholarly or biographical works about him.This book will more than likely be of interest to Catholic readers, but anyone who wishes to study the role of faith in Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy, will find this book a great read an a valuable resource.

Literature as Spiritual Direction

I had read a lot of Flannery O'Connor, but didn't know as much about Merton, Dorothy Day, or Walker Percy. Elie's assessment of O'Connor's writing is not only accurate, but insightful. He is a very gifted theologian, literary critic, and biographer. In reading him, I gained several new insights into O'Connor's stories and how her life and Catholicism influenced them. Some of his images (for instance, describing Mrs. Turpin in "Revelation" as a "hillbilly Thomist") were absolutely delightful and right on target. Through Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor, he also paints a wonderful picture of the strange and wonderful world of Southern Catholics. What is most impressive about this book, however, is how he weaves the lives, writing and faith journeys of four very different persons together, showing that indeed, grace perfects nature, even when the "nature" is quite different from one personality to another. They were all clearly influenced by the same threads of Catholic theology and spirituality, but reflected it back to us in very different ways. This book was interesting to me because of its literary and theological themes. But even more, it was spiritual reading. Again and again I stoped reading and compared their spiritual journeys to my own. Reading Elie's book has deepened my faith and given me hope that despite my own doubts and the "bumps in the road" on my spiritual journey, I might still one day hope to achieve some measure of holiness. What's more, I highlighted many passages which will surely be fodder for some future preaching!Fr. Charles Bouchard, OP

Wonderful book

If you are interested in any one of the four authors represented here (Day, Merton, O'Connor, Percy) you will find the context and comparisons that Elie makes extremely illuminating. It is a challenging task to interweave four biographies in a way that is interesting and mutually enriching. Elie does it. He writes well and his comparisons of these four along with other important influences are always clear and helpful. Very well done piece of work.

Illuminating

I stumbled upon an advance reader's copy of this work in a used bookshop--I had never heard of the book's author, an editor at FSG, but I was curious to find out how he would weave together the stories of his four subjects: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy. At first glance, they seemed to have little in common apart from their religion.As Elie shows in this entertaining and informative book, these writers were all highly aware of each other, and would meet on their separate "pilgrimages" toward authentic spirituality in increasingly secular times. "The School of the Holy Ghost" (as this quartet was once called) was not a school at all, as the Imagists or the Beats were; however, Elie shows, they felt a profound kinship, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the book is Elie's depiction of how they reached out to each other, through fan letters, postcards, reviews, publishing each other's work, and not-always-successful meetings (Merton and Percy had little to say to one another as they sipped bourbon on the porch of Merton's hermitage in Kentucky.) Above all, what brought these Catholic believers together was a love of literature, and Elie's book happily overflows with this same virtue. Whether discussing Day and Merton's dispute over Vietnam draft card burning, or the racism of O'Connor's letters, Elie writes elegant and opinionated prose. He shows how hard these people had to struggle to find a path for themselves, and how they came to see struggle as an inherent quality of faith. His readings of O'Connor and Percy's fiction are astute, and he productively contrasts Day's activism with Merton's withdrawal into solitude. Elie's use of letters--especially O'Connor's--brings out the voices of the principals, and at the end of the book, you feel that you know them personally. I would recommend this superb synthesis to anyone interested in the intersection of faith and literature.