Just after Thomas Mertons death in 1968, Catholic social activist Catherine de Hueck Doherty wrote to Mertons abbot: In some strange mysterious way I never quite understood, [he] was in part my spiritual son. The friendship originated when Merton worked at Friendship House in Harlem, and this volume of warm, candid correspondence traces nearly three decades of friendship through thirty-one surviving lettersfourteen written by Merton, and seventeen by Doherty. Doherty's previously unpublished letters are now brought together with those of Merton. The exchange reveals Mertons development from a young man searching for his place in Gods plan, to a monk seeking God through solitude and work for social justice.
