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Thomas Merton

1915–1968 · 53 years Specialist

The orphaned wanderer who became America's most read monk

Thomas Merton was born January 31, 1915, in Prades, France, to two painters, a New Zealand father, Owen, and an American Quaker mother, Ruth Jenkins, who moved the family to the United States within the year to escape the war. His mother died of stomach cancer in 1921, when he was six, and his father, mostly absent afterward on painting trips through Europe and North Africa, died of a brain tumor in 1931, when Merton was sixteen. His year at Cambridge in 1933 and 1934 went badly — drinking, academic trouble, a guardian who eventually pulled him out — before he crossed the Atlantic again and finished a degree at Columbia in 1938, still with no religion of his own.

A Hindu monk named Mahanambrata Brahmachari, visiting Columbia in 1938, is partly why Merton became a Catholic — he told the student to go read Augustine's Confessions and Thomas à Kempis. Merton was baptized that November and entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani, Kentucky, on December 10, 1941, taking vows of silence, poverty, and stability meant to end his writing. His abbot ordered him to keep publishing instead. His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold more than 150,000 copies and made an enclosed monk a public figure. He went on to write more than fifty books, moving from strict contemplative theology into open criticism of segregation and the Vietnam War, and into sustained dialogue with Zen Buddhism, corresponding with D. T. Suzuki from 1959 and meeting the Dalai Lama three times in 1968.

Merton took vows of celibacy and enclosure, then spent much of 1966 in a close, unresolved relationship with Margie Smith, a student nurse decades his junior he met after back surgery in Louisville — trading letters, arranging phone calls, and confiding the affair to his own journal before ending it under pressure from his abbot and his own conscience. It was not his first friction with obedience. His Cold War Letters, circulated privately in 1962 because his Trappist censors judged them too political to publish, argued that the nuclear arms race was a moral catastrophe the church was failing to name. He got the hermitage he had asked for in 1965, ostensibly for silence, and used it instead to keep writing, correspond with hundreds of people, and leave the enclosure more often, not less.

Merton died December 10, 1968, exactly 27 years to the day after he entered Gethsemani, at a Red Cross retreat center outside Bangkok, where he had gone to address an international conference of monastics. For decades the accepted account was accidental electrocution, his wet hand touching a faulty standing fan. Thai investigative reports made public in 2024 concluded instead that he died of sudden heart failure, the fan incidental. He was flown home on a military plane that also carried the remains of American soldiers killed in Vietnam, and was buried at Gethsemani. In a 2015 address to Congress, Pope Francis named him alongside Lincoln, King, and Dorothy Day as an American who shaped the country's conscience.

Lifespan

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Thomas Merton's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The Seven Storey Mountain book
Autobiography that made a cloistered monk a bestselling author 1948
The Sign of Jonas book
Monastic journal from his early years at Gethsemani 1953
New Seeds of Contemplation book 1962
Cold War Letters book
Circulated privately after Trappist censors judged them too political to publish 1962
Zen and the Birds of Appetite book
Published the year he died — the summation of his dialogue with Buddhism 1968

Life in brief

with age at each point

January 31, 1915 aged 0 Born in Prades, France
1921 aged ~6 His mother, Ruth, dies of stomach cancer
1931 aged ~16 His father, Owen, dies of a brain tumor
November 16, 1938 aged 23 Baptized a Catholic at Corpus Christi Church, New York
December 10, 1941 aged 26 Enters the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky
1948 aged ~33 Publishes The Seven Storey Mountain, a surprise bestseller
May 26, 1949 aged 34 Ordained a Catholic priest
1966 aged ~51 Falls in love with a student nurse while recovering from back surgery
December 10, 1968 aged 53 Dies near Bangkok while attending an interfaith monastic conference