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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 now work as an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has published the works of O'Connor, Merton, and Percy. I began to read Percy because he looked up to O'Connor and to Merton, even though he was a contemporary of theirs. So in a way he was an ideal interlocutor as I was making my way through the works of the other writers, because his admiration for them was akin to mine.

What does a young person serious about reading and their faith take away from a study of these four lives?

First of all, you see that it's not too much to say they were converted by books. Three of the four were not Catholics. Thomas Merton had been raised among the ruins of medieval France. Dorothy Day had been either baptized or confirmed in the Episcopal Church as a teenager. Walker Percy had been raised a Presbyterian.

It was their experience with literature that quickened the religious impulse in them.

Day read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Dickens. Merton read medieval philosophy. He took seriously the injunction in certain books of philosophy that we are all called to a personal experience of the divine.

Walker Percy read existentialist work including Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Camus. He recognized himself in their alienated protagonists—the representative figure whose malaise or despair is that of western society.

The first thing I would say to a young person is to look to books and learn from them—not only to see how books are written, but also to learn about how the human situation is to be understood. Don't feel obligated to like everything. Find certain works that one has strong affinities with, trust that, and follow it.

How can this process help build a good writer?

These four authors recognized that what a great writer does is make the work of others his or her own. Really serious books demand that we assimilate them to ourselves. You take them as a challenge to our whole lives. They're not merely entertainment. They're not merely information. There's a radical injunction at the bottom of them. Life is serious business. You have your life—how are you going to spend it?

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47