In 1936, when Thomas Merton was an undergraduate at Columbia College in New York City, he handed a story to Robert Giroux, a fellow classmate and an ­editor of a student review. Giroux, impressed, said he would take the piece if Merton chopped it by a third. Merton wasn’t fussed. “Fine, but you do the cutting,” he told Giroux, and that was the unofficial start of an historic editorial partnership.Merton was, as Pope Francis pointed out in his recent speech to the US Congress, “a man of dialogue”, and these letters preserve Merton’s conversation with the man who would make him a best-seller. The letters begin on 8 March 1948, with Giroux writing to Merton about proofs of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain , and end with a letter on 22 June