Catholic Monk Thomas Merton, famous mainly for his unexpectedly wildly popular 1948 memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, and in trouble with the U.S. government because of his anti-Vietnam War writings, died suddenly in Thailand in 1968. His biography, authorized by, and with the cooperation of, Merton’s home abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, was published in 1984. At that point, essentially all that the public knew—or thought they knew—about Merton’s death was what John Wheeler, the Associated Press reporter based in Bangkok, had written in his wire service report the day after the death, and what Brother Patrick Hart of the Gethsemani Abbey had written in 1973 in the postscript to The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Wheeler, citing anonymous “Catholic sources”…
FULL ARTICLEWhat Thomas Merton’s Authorized Biographer Revealed and What He Concealed
