Includes bibliographical references (pages 475-534) and index.

This volume chronicles the influences, writing struggles and religious imagination at work in four American writers -- Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. All of them were Catholic, and all of them flourished over the roughly 30- or 40-year period from the 1930's through the 60's that is sometimes called ''the Catholic moment'' in America. Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Day was the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; O'Connor was a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Percy was a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. The author draws comparisons between their backgrounds, temperaments, circumstances and words, he reveals "four like-minded writers" whose work took the shape of a movement. Though they produced no manifesto they were unified as pilgrims moving toward the same destination while taking different paths.

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