The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton
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In 1978, Michael Mott was commissioned to write the authorized biography of Thomas Merton. Mott was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980 and The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton was published in 1984. The biography remained on the non-fiction best-seller list of The New York Times for nine weeks. The book has had nine printings with 60,000 copies sold to date. Winner of a number of awards, the biography was the runner up for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1984.
Biography: The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, (U.S.) 1986. Quality Paperback Book Club edition, (U.S.) July, 1985., Sheldon Press, London (U.K.), 1986. Trade paperback edition, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, (U.S.), 1986. Lead reviews in The New York Times Book Review, (Robert Cole); Boston Globe, (Francis Lally); The Philadelphia Inquirer, (Richard Marius); Washington Post, (Nancy Wilson Ross); Chicago Tribune, (Eugene Kennedy); U.S.A. Today, (John Cooney); Time, (Richard Ostling); Newsweek, (Keneth Woodward); America, (James Milord); St. Louis Post Dispatch, (John Jay Hughes); San Francisco Examiner, (Jim Lewis); Los Angeles Times, (John Donnelly); Publishers Weekly, (interview with Ellen Mangin). Also reviewed in: The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Toledo Blade, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Atlanta Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Washington Book World, Nashville Banner, Living Church, This World, Louiseville Courier Journal, Cleveland Plaindealer, Ohioana Quarterly, Theological Studies, Our Sunday Visitor, Universitas, etc. Extracts appeared in The Reader's Digest. Reviews of the English edition appeared in: The Sunday Telegraph (Patrick Catling); Times Literary Supplement, (Peter Hebblethwaite), Irish Times, (Ben Kiely); Spectator, (Peter Levi); as well as The Friend, Methodist Recorder, Church Times. Extracts from the biography were also read on BBC Radio 3 (March 22–29, 1986). The biography was also the subject of a review symposium in Horizon, and of an issue of The Merton Seasonal. Six newspaper interviews; twenty-two radio interviews including two on National Public Radio, ten television interviews including one with Studs Terkel, CBS 60 minutes, on November 19, 1984. The biography was the Alternative Choice of the Book of the Month Club. |