Triple biography, told largely through their correspondence, of 3 college friends who ultimately went on to literary fame religious writer Thomas Merton, minimalist poet Robert Lax, and author/photographer/magazine publisher Edward Rice.

The second volume of Thomas Merton's letters is devoted to his correspondence with friends -- relatives and family friends, longtime friends, special friends, young people he regarded as new friends, and circular letters addressed to groups of friends. They range from 1931, ten years before he became a monk, to 1968, the year in which he died at a monastic conference in Thailand.

From the time they first met as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the mid-1930s, the noted editor Robert Giroux (1914–2008) and the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915–1968) became friends. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton capture their personal and professional relationship, extending from the time of the publication of Merton's 1948 best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, until a few months before Merton's untimely death in December 1968. As editor-in-chief at Harcourt, Brace & Company and then at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Giroux not only edited twenty-six of Merton's books but served as an adviser to Merton as he dealt with unexpected problems with his religious superiors at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, as well as those in France and Italy. These letters, arranged chronologically, offer invaluable insights into the publishing process that brought some of Merton's most important writings to his readers. Patrick Samway, S.J., had unparalleled access not only to the materials assembled here but to Giroux's unpublished talks about Merton, which he uses to his advantage, especially in his beautifully crafted introduction that interweaves the stories of both men with a chronicle of their personal and collaborative relationship. The result is a rich and rewarding volume, which shows how Giroux helped Merton to become one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticsm or the familiar patterns of anthropological study. Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers -- which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs.

What if we truly belong to each other? What if we are all walking around shining like the sun? Mystic, monk, and activist Thomas Merton asked those questions in the twentieth century. Writer Sophfronia Scott is asking them today. In The Seeker and the Monk, Scott mines the extensive private journals of one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past for guidance on how to live in these fraught times. As a Black woman who is not Catholic, Scott both learns from and pushes back against Merton, holding spirited, and intimate conversations on race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, and love. She asks: What is the connection between contemplation and action? Is there ever such a thing as a wrong answer to a spiritual question? How do we care about the brutality in the world while not becoming overwhelmed by it? By engaging in this lively discourse, readers will gain a steady sense of how to dwell more deeply within--and even to love--this despairing and radiant world.

The published writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton were always censored from two sources during his lifetime. First, by Merton himself, as he certainly didn’t write everything down or share all of what he included in his drafts. He selected carefully what he considered appropriate for publication. Second, Thomas Merton was extensively censored by his religious superiors. They regularly judged that things Merton chose to write should not be made available in print. This was not infrequently a source of great frustration to Merton. In this book, Fr. Patrick W. Collins presents an uncensored view of the life and thoughts of Thomas Merton by plumbing his correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues over the years. Merton’s personal and professional correspondence was previously published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. In this volume, Collins extracts and organizes from these sources many of the significant subjects about which Merton wrote and presents each topic chronologically. In this way, readers can easily follow the development of Merton's thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and impressions over the years on a variety of topics of concern to him.