Celebrating the birth of the author of The Seven Storey Mountain, a Canadian biographer and scholar examines the lasting significance of a writer steeped in the spiritual and intellectual richness of 1960s Catholicism Thomas merton was a perpetual pilgrim always in search of strange lands and new horizons. He was the quintessential extra-territorial writer, unhoused in any single setting, crossing boundaries – intellectual and spiritual – that would deter most seekers after truth, particularly those consecrated to a religious life distinguished by its stabilitas.Born in Prades in the Pyrenees on 31 January 1915, Merton was variously schooled and reared in France, the United States and England (including Oakham School and Clare College, Cambridge). So when he was accepted as a