The Seven Storey Mountain

The Seven Storey Mountain is the autobiography of a young man who led a full and worldly life and then, at the age of 26, entered a Trappist monastery. Thomas Merton, already known as a poet, tells his life story from his birth in 1915 to his present existence as a monk. His book was written in the monastery at Gethsemani, Kentucky. The Seven Storey Mountain is the extraordinary testament of an intensely active and brilliant young American who decided to withdraw from the world only after he had fully immersed himself in it. Merton uses the seven-tiered mountain (Dante's image of Purgatory) as a symbol of the modern world. In every sense a man of his times - the period between the two wars - Thomas Merton spent his childhood in America and France. His father was English; his mother, an American Quaker. At twenty, an orphan, he left England for America and enrolled at Columbia. Concerned over the social and economic injustices of modern life, he joined a young Communist group. Later he worked at a Catholic settlement house in Harlem. It was several years after his conversion that he entered the Trappist order. Father M. Louis, as he is called in the Order, tells his story with wit, intensity, and exuberance. Part of the interest of the book is provided by the fact that he writes from a monk's cell, with knowledge and authority, of modern artists like Picasso, Joyce, and Duke Ellington. The later section of the book forms a fascinating account of the daily life of a Trappist.