The Life You Save May Be Your Own

American author Paul Elie’s biography, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003), compares and contrasts the lives of four Catholic writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor, the last of whom wrote a famous short story that provides Elie with the title for his book. For his work on The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Elie earned a National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography nomination.

Like all of the book's subjects save for O'Connor, Dorothy Day was not born a devout Catholic. In fact, Day spent much of her formative years in the 1910s living a secular, bohemian lifestyle in New York's Lower East Side. She worked primarily as a journalist and social activist, writing for various Socialist publications including The Liberator, The Call, and The Masses. Politically speaking, she vacillated between Anarchism, Socialism, and Syndicalism, a radical pro-labor movement. In all of these pursuits, however, she remained firmly opposed to violence, famously stating, "I am a pacifist even in the class war."

By mid-1925, however, Day became increasingly engrossed in the Catholic faith, owing largely to her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, Tamar Teresa. In an effort to combine her dual passions for Catholicism and social activism, she helped found the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, along with the French theologian Peter Maurin. In the inaugural issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, Day and Maurin put forth their mission statement: To use the resources of the Catholic Church to help those suffering most during the Great Depression by "working not only for their spiritual but for their material welfare."



At the height of its popularity, the Catholic Worker had a circulation of 150,000. However, that number plummeted to 30,000 after Day broke with the larger Catholic Church by opposing the Spanish Civil War. After that war ended, circulation climbed back up to 75,000 but plummeted again after losing the support of the centralized Catholic Church when Day and her writers spoke out against World War II. As opposed to the Church's "just war doctrine," Day never backed down from her uncompromising pacifism, no matter the nature of the conflict.

Though the Catholic Worker Movement eventually fizzled out, Day continued to work to promote social justice for the rest of her life. In the years since her death in 1980, the Catholic Church, despite its occasionally uneasy relationship with Day, has opened an inquiry into her potential canonization as a saint.

Also a staunch pacifist—as well as a fellow contributor to the Catholic Worker—the French-American monk and writer Thomas Merton, like Day, had little use for religion early on in his life. At the age of eighteen, while traveling in Rome, Merton became strangely drawn to the city's churches. Enraptured by the splendor of these architectural wonders, Merton read the entire New Testament in Latin. Though his religious fervor faded upon returning to the United States, he later reconnected with his spirituality after a meeting with a Hindu monk. Contrary to Merton's expectations, the monk advised him to explore his family's spiritual roots, recommending to him various works by Catholic academics and thinkers. While Merton would indeed become a devout Catholic and later a Trappist monk, the experience with the Hindu monk engendered in Merton a sense that multiple religions can and should coexist, leading to strong interfaith relationships. And while his most famous work, The Seven Storey Mountain, focused on Judeo-Christian ideology, Merton would spend the rest of his life exploring and writing about Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and other faiths and philosophies that exist outside of traditional Christianity.



Perhaps ironically, Elie notes that his third subject, the Alabama-born novelist and philosopher Walker Percy, found his way to Catholicism in part through the writings of existentialists and proto-existentialists like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Søren Kierkegaard. Through their ideas, the young college graduate Percy began to question whether science was capable of addressing the mysteries of existence, leading him to spirituality and, eventually, the Catholic Church. Though best known today for his first novel, the 1961 National Book Award winner The Moviegoer, Percy had established himself five years earlier at the age of forty as a Catholic writer, contributing an article about race to the liberal-leaning Catholic magazine, The Commonweal. In that article, Percy argued that Christians possessed a moral responsibility to condemn segregation and racism throughout the South. Throughout his life, Percy continued to connect his deep faith to philosophical and societal concerns. In 1975, at the age of fifty-nine, Percy published Message in a Bottle, a collection of essays that attempted to reconcile what he viewed as the two dominant philosophies of a dying era in the Western world: Judeo-Christian theology and rationalism.

Finally, Elie explores his favorite of the four biographical subjects, the American short story author and National Book Award winner Flannery O'Connor. Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, O'Connor was the only one of Elie's subjects who strongly embraced Catholicism virtually from her birth until her death. As a student at the University of Iowa, O'Connor kept a prayer journal containing personal ruminations on her relationship with God. Between 1956 and the year of her death in 1964, she reviewed over a hundred books written by some of the world's most prominent Christian intellectuals. Meanwhile, her beloved short stories viewed countless personal and societal issues through the lens of her Roman Catholic faith, including racism, intersexuality, and the Holocaust. Tragically, O'Connor died at the age of thirty-nine of lupus, leaving behind a body of work that has fascinated religious and secular readers alike.

According to The New Yorker, Elie employs "warm, clear writing" to make readers care deeply about his four subjects in The Life You Save May Be Your Own.