Author Description

Product Description This is the story of four writers, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy. These four American Catholics were called the School of the Holy Ghost. Paul Elie tells these four writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past to the chaos of post-war American life. And it is a story about the power of literature to change—and to save—our lives. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Life You Save May Be Your OwnAn American PilgrimageBy Paul ElieBlackstone AudiobooksCopyright © 2004Paul ElieAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780786128532Chapter One Experience * * *The night the earthquake struck San Francisco-April 18, 1906-DorothyDay was there. Startled awake, she lay alone in bed in thedark in the still-strange house, trying to understand what was happeningand what it meant, for she was confident that it had a meaning, a significancebeyond itself. Some years later she described that night in her autobiography. By thenshe was known as an organizer and agitator, a living saint, the prioress of theBowery. But she saw herself as a journalist, first of all, and gave a journalist'seyewitness account of the event, which had brought on the most hauntingof her early "remembrances of God." "The earthquake started with a deep rumbling and the convulsions ofthe earth started afterward, so that the earth became a sea which rocked ourhouse in a most tumultuous manner. There was a large windmill and watertank in back of the house and I can remember the splashing of the waterfrom the tank on top of our roof." She was eight years old, the third child of four. Her family had movedfrom New York to Oakland earlier in the year after her father, a journalist,found work with one of the local papers. Back in Brooklyn she had shared abedroom with their Irish servant girl. Here she shared a room with her babysister, who slept in her arms. "My father took my brothers from their beds and rushed to the fron