The Life You Save May Be Your Own Audiobook By Paul Elie cover art

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

An American Pilgrimage

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The Life You Save May Be Your Own

By: Paul Elie
Narrated by: Lloyd James
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In the middle of the twentieth century, four American Catholics, working independently of one another, came to believe that the best way to explore the quandaries of religious faith was in writing. The four writers were Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy.

Called the School of the Holy Ghost, for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read each others' books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common".

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 ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change, and to save, our lives.

©2003 Paul Elie (P)2004 Blackstone Audiobooks Art & Literature Authors Catholicism Christian Literature & Art Christianity Literary History & Criticism Ministry & Evangelism Religious Studies United States World Literature Middle Ages

Critic reviews

"This thoroughly researched and well-sourced work deserves attention from students of history, literature, and religion, but it will be of special significance to Catholic readers interested in the expression of faith in the modern world." (Publishers Weekly)

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As four remarkable writers (Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy) are written of from the inside out, TLYSMBYO weaves a lovely tapestry of four pilgrims finding God in the true, the good and the ugly.

Four curious Catholics

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I enjoyed this listen and will re-read. Worth the re-read.

This was like sitting in a room with four incredible, good people: people concerned with poverty, social welfare, war…

Gripping, thought-provoking, though incomplete to an agnostic

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This book/audio follows the lives and thought of four Catholic literary figures from the 20th century: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. The perspective is clearly on the literary aspect of the lives of these well known Catholics. This is its strength and its weakness.

I found the work to be insightful and informative regarding the life stories of its protagonists, giving a helpful understanding of the contexts in which these persons lived and wrote. I was particularly taken by the portarits offered of O'Connor and Percy. Of course, these were to two persons of whom I had the least detailed knowledge.

The author's handling of Day and Merton left me somewhat frustrated. Perhaps this is because I have a better working knowledge of these two authors. The scheme of a life story with a literary focus worked well with the protagonists whose focus was literary. It didn't prove satisfying with those protagonists whose literary output was not the primary focus of their life's work.

These frustrations duly noted, my over all impression was that the tale told by the author was well worth the time spent listening. The audio quality of the spoken version is excellent and the narrator is quite good.

well worth the price and time

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Writer gives great insight into the lives and writings of these four Catholic writers. I liked the insight into their lives set in the context of historical events as well as the reference to their writings and their interaction with each other.

Great detail of information

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I totally enjoyed listening to this book and it inspires me to seek out books written by the authors mentioned in it.

Great book!

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When you walk along with them, you begin to reflect upon what your own pilgrimage is.

4 life long pilgrimages worthy to walk along with

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I have been wanting to get around to The Life You Save May Be Your Own since it came out in the early 2000s. After having read a brief biography of Dorothy Day and a book of essays about Thomas Merton earlier this summer, I decided it was time. I have also read three books about O’Connor, a more academic look at her work, a short biography, and a collection of her early journals I felt like I had a pretty good handle on O’Connor. But I knew nothing about Walker Percy outside of his novels.

Elie mostly tells the story chronologically. Dorothy Day is almost 20 years older than Merton and Percy and nearly 30 years older than O’Connor. But she also lived longer than both Merton and O’Connor. And while Percy lived until 1990, and Day passed away in 1980, Day was 83 when she passed away, and Percy was only 73.

All four are well-known Catholic writers who were consciously Catholic in different ways. O’Connor was the only cradle Catholic, the other three were all adult converts to Catholicism. O’Connor and Percy were both also very much Southern Writers while Day was most identified with NYC and her non-fiction writing. Merton was the most clearly a “spiritual” writer and the only clergy member of the group.

As a biography or a group of biographies, this was well written and included good detail on their lives as well as context on their writing. But as a stand-alone, I think it was too long. It was too long to feel like a brief biography and it was too short to be a definitive biography of any of them. It was interesting to see how much the four of them interacted and wrote one another, although there were very few personal interactions. Merton considered joining the Catholic Worker movement but decided instead to become a monk. They all had mutual friends, and drafts of different books were passed around.

The value of the book was in the exploration of the different ways to think of themselves as writers and “Catholic” writers and how they related to the church more broadly. I don’t regret reading The Life You Save May Be Your Own, but I did pick it up over the summer when I tend to hit a reading slump. And the length of the book did not help the reading slump.

A joint biography

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