title: The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
author:  Thomas Merton 
description: In 1941, a brilliant, good-looking young man decided to give up a promising literary career in New York to enter a monastery in Kentucky, from where he proceeded to become one of the most influential writers of this century. Talk about losing your life in order to find it. Thomas Merton's first book, <I>The Seven Storey Mountain</I>, describes his early doubts, his conversion to a Catholic faith of extreme certainty, and his decision to take life vows as a Trappist. Although his conversionary piety sometimes falls into sticky-sweet abstractions, Merton's autobiographical reflections are mostly wise, humble, and concrete. The best reason to read <I>The Seven Storey Mountain</I>, however, may be the one Merton provided in his introduction to its Japanese translation: "I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both." <I>--Michael Joseph Gross</I>
zlib_text: 'Jhe Seven Storey :Afountain 
  
  BOOKS BY THOMAS MERTON 
  The Ascent to Truth 
  Disputed Questions 
  The Last of the Fathers 
  Love and Living 
  No Man Is an Island 
  The Seven Storey Mountain 
  The Sign of jonas 
  The Waters ofSiloe 
  
  THOMAS 
  MERTON 
  The Seven Storey 
  Mountain 
  "FOR I TELL YOU THAT GOD IS ABLE OF THESE STONES 
  TO RAISE UP CHILDREN TO ABRAHAM." 
  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers 
  San Diego 
  New York 
  London 
  
  Copyright 1948 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 
  Copyright renewed 1976 by The Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust 
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or 
  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, 
  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval 
  system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 
  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to: 
  Permissions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, Orlando, Florida 32887. 
  The poems "Song for Our 