The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton

From the time they first met as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the mid-1930s, the noted editor Robert Giroux (1914–2008) and the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915–1968) were destined to be friends. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton captures their personal and professional relationship, from the time of the publication of Merton’s 1948 best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, until Merton’s untimely death in December 1968. As editor-in-chief at Harcourt, Brace & Company and then at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Giroux not only edited twenty-six of Merton’s books but served as an adviser to Merton as he dealt with unexpected problems with his religious superiors at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, as well as those in France and Italy.

These letters, arranged chronologically, offer invaluable insights into the publishing process that brought some of Merton’s most important writings to his readers. Patrick Samway, S.J., had unparalleled access not only to the materials assembled here but to Giroux’s unpublished talks about Merton, which he uses to his advantage, especially in his beautifully crafted introduction that interweaves the stories of both men with a chronicle of their personal and collaborative relationship. The result is a rich and rewarding volume, which shows how Giroux helped Merton to become one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

Patrick Samway, S.J., a former literary editor of America, the nation’s premier Catholic weekly, is an emeritus professor of English at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He is the author of Walker Percy: A Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), a New York Times Notable Book; and editor of Percy’s Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991) and A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy (University Press of Mississippi, 1995). He is the editor, with Ben Forkner, of the noted two-volume anthology Stories of the Old South (1989; rev. ed. Penguin, 1995) and Stories of the Modern South (1977; rev. ed. Penguin, 1986). He is the author of Educating Darfur Refugees: A Jesuit’s Efforts in Chad (University of Scranton Press, 2007). His next book, based on the correspondence of Robert Giroux and Flannery O’Connor, is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press. Among his recent honors is the Newbridge Silver Award presented by the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society at their 30th annual Festival in Newbridge, Ireland, on July 23, 2017.