Where to Start With Thomas Merton

Start Merton with The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography Harcourt, Brace and Company published in 1948, a year after he took solemn vows at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Save the journals for later. It is the book that turned a Trappist monk into a bestselling author, and it remains the fastest way into a body of work that eventually ran past seventy titles.

What is The Seven Storey Mountain, and why does it come first?

It is Merton's account of his own conversion: a Columbia University student and sometime poet, drawn briefly into left-wing politics, who was received into the Catholic Church on November 16, 1938, and who entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, on December 10, 1941, according to the chronology kept by the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University, which serves as the official repository of his papers. A contemporaneous notice in Kirkus's original 1948 review called it a “frank tale of an individual’s spiritual pilgrimage” with an appeal that reached well past a religious readership — which is still the case for a first-time reader today. The book has the shape of a conversion narrative, but it reads like a novel: a young man's restlessness, his drift through Cambridge and Columbia, and the slow, specific pressure that lands him at a monastery gate. Nothing in it requires prior belief. It only requires patience with a writer working out, in real time, what he actually believes.

Where do you go after the autobiography?

Not into the journals yet. Go to New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton's 1961 expansion of his earlier Seeds of Contemplation (1949) — a revision so thorough that the later book is usually treated as the standard text. It is not a memoir at all but a set of short, aphoristic chapters on prayer and the interior life, closer to a devotional companion than a narrative, and it is the Merton book most often handed to readers who have no monastic background whatsoever.

The reissue is worth naming specifically because New Directions, which has kept most of Merton's work in print since his death, still lists it as the current standard edition; that continuity of publisher matters more with Merton than with most spiritual writers, since so much of his archive has moved between houses over the decades.

What about the journals — does The Sign of Jonas belong on the same list?

Eventually, not first. The Sign of Jonas, published in 1953 while Merton was serving as Master of Scholastics at Gethsemani, is drawn from his private monastic journals and reads accordingly: interior, occasionally repetitive, unconcerned with narrative momentum. It rewards a reader who already has the shape of Merton's conversion in mind from the autobiography and the vocabulary of contemplative practice from New Seeds. Read cold, it can feel like listening to one side of a long conversation.

A reading order

1. The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) — the conversion, told as narrative.
2. New Seeds of Contemplation (1961, revising the 1949 Seeds of Contemplation) — the interior practice, told as instruction.
3. The Sign of Jonas (1953) — the daily record, told as journal.

Beyond these three, Merton's catalog splits along the lines his own life did: strictly monastic writing on one side, and on the other his later, more expansive engagement with traditions outside Christianity — Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Gandhian nonviolence — visible in later titles such as Zen and the Birds of Appetite and The Way of Chuang Tzu. That later work assumes the earlier ground has already been covered. It is not where a first reader should land.

Frequently asked questions

Was Merton raised Catholic? No. He was received into the Catholic Church on November 16, 1938, as an adult, after his undergraduate years — a conversion, not an upbringing.

How long was Merton a monk before he died? He entered Gethsemani on December 10, 1941, and died near Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968 — the twenty-seventh anniversary of his arrival, a coincidence his own archive notes without embellishment.

Did Merton write only about Christianity? No. His later books, including Zen and the Birds of Appetite and The Way of Chuang Tzu, engage seriously with Buddhist and Taoist thought, part of an interfaith curiosity that grew more pronounced in the last decade of his life.

Is The Seven Storey Mountain still the right starting point in 2026? Yes, by the same logic that made it a bestseller in 1948: it is the one book in the catalog that assumes nothing about the reader's own belief and simply tells a story.

For a related conversations perspective, read Where to Start With the Bhagavad Gita.