The Spirituality of Writing

It took me a year to read The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie. It is a sizable biography of four writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. They were Catholic and writing at the same time (primarily the 1950s and '60s) and aware of each other's work.
This book is beautifully written, but it's also dense. I would pick it up, read a little, put it down and then pick it back up again. I really got going after I started reading Flannery O'Connor's short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. (Read the excellent short story the books is named after here.)
Elie's compelling theme is that these writers were all on spiritual pilgrimage via their writing. The writers themselves are fascinating:

• Dorothy Day: pacifist, journalist, war protester, founder of The Catholic Worker movement.
• Thomas Merton: A Trappist monk and writer who explored Buddhism and other forms of Eastern spirituality.
• Flannery O'Connor: the master of the short story, a wary member of New York literary society who was exiled by debilitating illness to her Georgia farm.
• Walker Percy: a Louisiana gentleman with a strong interest in medicine and science.

Most of the reviews of this book say it is hard to categorize because it is rich and complicated, and I completely agree. All these writers were vibrant contrarians, and Elie admires and accentuates their differences. At the same time, he sees them all as master communicators and even concilitators. In an interesting interview, Elie says he respects them because they had vibrant, complex messages to convey through their writing.

One of the main traits I champion in the people in my book is their ability to write about matters of faith in terms the nonbeliever can appreciate. The ability of Merton or Dorothy Day to maintain a dialogue with the modern world--as Vatican II urged Catholics to do--is just profound. They stayed in touch with the average middle-class person who thinks religion is bosh.
Those who undertook the later protests against the Vietnam War don't seem interested in dialogue. They don't seem to have met those who supported the war with mutual respect. Dialogue wasn't really attempted. That was Merton's objection to them. He said nobody's mind was changed through those symbolic actions.

Read the whole interview here.