Once he began to write, however, it poured out. After all, he had become a monk in order to leave his past life behind. When Dom Frederic suggested that Merton write his life story, the novice was at first reluctant. ''I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery,'' Merton said, adding that the abbot ''encouraged me when I wanted to write poems and reflections and other things that came into my head in the novitiate.'' Received Merton as a postulant and accepted him, in March 1942, as a Trappist novice. Sense,'' Merton wrote, ''one man was more responsible for 'The Seven Storey Mountain' than I was, even as he was the cause of all my other writing.'' This was Dom Frederic Dunne, the abbot who had As Thomas Merton revealed in his journals, he had begun to write his famous autobiographyįour years earlier, at the Trappist monastery in Kentucky to which he had journeyed in December 1941, at the age of 26, after resigning as a teacher of English literature at St. He Seven Storey Mountain'' was first published 50 years ago this month. OctoBOOKEND / By ROBERT GIROUX Thomas Merton's Durable Mountain
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