Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and, arguably, the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. He was born in Prades, France, to two artists: Owen Merton, from New Zealand, and Ruth Jenkins, from the United States. His youth took him through France, England and the United States, and he studied at Cambridge and then at Columbia University. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1938.
On December 10, 1941, he arrived at Gethsemani, a community of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, the most ascetic Roman Catholic monastic order. He spent the next twenty-seven years there. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and been translated into over fifteen languages. He wrote more than sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles, on subjects from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence and the nuclear arms race.
Those years changed how he understood himself, and they drew him into public life. Daniel Berrigan called him the conscience of the peace movement of the 1960s. Merton named race and peace as the two most urgent issues of the time, and he supported the nonviolent civil rights movement. He endured severe criticism for his political writings, which some thought unbecoming of a monk.
In his last years he became deeply interested in Asian religions, particularly Zen Buddhism, and in East-West dialogue. After meeting him during his 1968 trip to the Far East, the Dalai Lama praised his understanding of Buddhism. Merton died near Bangkok on December 10, 1968, while attending a conference on East-West monastic dialogue.
