Jewels in her Crown:
Treasures from the Special Collections of
Columbia’s Libraries
Master Labels
8/30/04
East Asian Collections
New York City History
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History
Theology & Religion
120Thomas Merton graduated from Columbia College in 1938, and received his Master’s in English in 1939. He had converted to Catholicism
while at Columbia, but surprised his many friends and professors, including
Mark Van Doren, by becoming a Trappist monk, a member of the Cisterian Order of
the Strict Observance, in 1941. He was later ordained a priest, taking the name
of Father M. Louis. Among Merton’s most widely read writings is his
autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, shown here in the original
setting-copy for the first edition. In addition to Merton’s own changes, the typescript
also has editor Robert Giroux’s corrections in pencil and a copy editor’s
marking in red pencil. Less well known material in Columbia’s Merton Papers are
most of his lecture and conference notes which he used while serving as master
of scholastics and, later, master of novices, prior to his untimely death in Bangkok in 1968.
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