A book by Canadian author and educator Mary Frances Coady on the friendship of Evelyn Waugh and U.S. theologian Thomas Merton has been announced. Entitled Merton and Waugh: A Monk, A Crusty Old Man, and The Seven Storey Mountain
According to noted Waugh scholar Robert Murray Davis in an advance notice:
… in this brief but thoroughly researched book, Coady provides important new details about Merton’s role not just as willing student but as spiritual advisor to Waugh and puts those details into the cultural and religious context of the years after World War II in clear and sometimes eloquent fashion.
A preliminary reading from the book was presented by Coady at the March 2012 conference, Evelyn Waugh: An Englishman in Catholic America jointly sponsored by the Evelyn Waugh Society and the Loyola-Notre Dame Library in Baltimore.
