Having read one and just begun another of two modern American biographical classics, largely set in New York, I thought I might recommend them to my readers. I have known of them both for over twenty five years and only now gotten around to reading them. The Seven Storey Mountain by Father Thomas Merton and Witness by Whittacker Chambers.
Both works are intensely Catholic in their focus because they are blatant accounts of each man's personal quest for God and each one finding Him in the modern world even among the highest and most corrupt levels of society. Merton became a Trappist monk and Chambers became a Quaker and a top journalist exposing Communist espionage in the U.S. government.
There is a connection between Merton and Chambers in the person of Henry R. Luce (Time magazine's founder). In 1949 the Luces donated the property for Mepkin Abbey, a daughter monastery to Merton's Gethsemani, where Henry Luce himself is buried, and of which his wife Clare Boothe Luce continues to be a great benefactress. Chambers was hired to work for Time during his toughest years after his break with communism and became it's chief editor, with Luce's full support.
Take either book with you for your Christmas travels and you will have no time for direct TV!
There is a Whittacker Chambers blog.
Another great Catholic (Chambers was not Catholic but should have been, given his honesty and insight: his self-effacing integrity was most Catholic) American author which I am recently discovering (and was thoroughly Catholic like neither Merton nor Chambers was) is William Thomas Walsh. He produced the greatest Spanish historical biographies in the English language: e.g. Philip II.
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