Discussed in this essay:

On Thomas Merton, by Mary Gordon. Shambhala. 160 pages. $22.95.

The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton’s account of his conversion to Catholicism in 1938 and his subsequent entry into a Trappist monastery in Kentucky called Gethsemani, sold six hundred thousand copies when it was first published, in 1948, prompted a surprising number of men to become (or want to become) Trappist monks, and has since been translated into over twenty languages. The novelist Mary Gordon, in her new study of Merton, suggests it was not a book but a phenomenon. It…