Best known as the author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), the American theologian Michael Novak wrote more than 50 books and countless articles on subjects ranging from ethnicity to trade unions. His life tracked some of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous decades in American politics and the life of the Catholic Church.

Novak was born in 1933 in the industrial town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, into a poor ethnic Slovak family. One of five children, he entered the seminary for the Congregation of Holy Cross at the age of 14. His superiors eventually sent him to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, from where he graduated in 1958. Not long after, he decided against proceeding to ordination, instead commencing graduate studies at Harvard in 1960.