Famous Catholics In Literature

Gilbert Keith Chesterton KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer,[2] philosopher, Christian apologist, a literary and art critic.

Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown,[3] and wrote on apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.[4][5] Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an orthodox Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism from high church Anglicanism. Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman and John Ruskin.[6]

He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox".[7] Of his writing style, Time observed: "Whenever possible, Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.

Chesterton is the most Catholic of Catholic writers, though some of his most important works of Christian apologetics precede his reception into the Church in 1922. He wrote novels (ideas given a context of fiction), poetry, apologetics, biography, detective stories – the Fr Brown short stories – and an enormous quantity of journalism. His biography of St Thomas Aquinas, though containing very few facts, not all of them correct, was a dazzling exercise in compressing dense theological ideas into captivating prose. He helped formulate the idea of “distributism” – giving land to the people. As a controversialist and debater, he was one of the best of his day. There was an element of anti-Semitism in some of his work but he was an eloquent opponent of Nazi ideology. His book Orthodoxy remains one of the most compelling accounts of Christian belief of the 20th century.

Why I Am A Catholic, by G. K. Chesterton

"It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church.  The moment men cease to pull against it, they feel a tug toward it.  The moment they cease to shout it down, they begin to listen to it with pleasure.  The moment they try to be fair to it, they begin to be fond of it."

It was 1926 when the mirthful, insightful British writer G. K. Chesterton penned these words.  And he meant them.  Because four years earlier, in his 48th year, Chesterton became a Catholic.  After being raised in an ostensibly Unitarian household dedicated more to living the golden rule than worshiping the Triune God, Chesterton felt the tug, began to listen and then became fond of the Catholic Church.  But what did he find? What did Chesterton encounter once within the Church he described as "larger on the inside than it is on the outside." And what exactly made this brilliant and enlightened thinker join an institution maligned as being outdated and dogmatic?

In his 1926 essay, Why I Am a Catholic, Chesterton would tell us.

The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.  I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only thing that ..." As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret.  (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior, in the sense of supercilious.  (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.  (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message ...
The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away ...
Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.  The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves ...

The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. 

There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years.  Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors.  The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them. ... But [the Church] does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice.  By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future.  The Church does make herself responsible for warning her people against these; and upon these the real issue of the case depends.  She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes, those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes ...

Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong.  The policeman comes too late when he tries to prevent men from going wrong.  The doctor comes too late, for he only comes to lock up a madman, not to advise a sane man on how not to go mad ...

Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind.  We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still ...

G. K. Chesterton found that "something": The enduring truth, the exhilarating goodness and the ineffable beauty of the Catholic Church.  And he found it by being fair to it.

Best-selling author Vince Flynn, who wrote the Mitch Rapp counterterrorism thriller series and sold more than 15 million books in the U.S. alone, died  in Minnesota after a more than two-year battle with prostate cancer at the age of 47.

Flynn was supporting himself by bartending when he self-published his first novel, "Term Limits," in 1997 after getting more than 60 rejection letters. After it became a local best-seller, Picket Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, signed him to a two-book deal - and "Term Limits" became a New York Times best-seller in paperback.

The St. Paul-based author also sold millions of books in the international market and averaged about a book a year, most of them focused on Rapp, a CIA counterterrorism operative. His 14th novel, "The Last Man," was published last year.

"As good as Vince was on the page - and he gave millions of readers countless hours of pleasure - he was even more engaging in person," said Carolyn Reidy, president and CEO of his publisher, Simon & Schuster. "Yes, we will miss the Mitch Rapp stories that are classic modern thrillers, but we will miss Vince even more."

Flynn died at a hospital in St. Paul, surrounded by about 35 relatives and friends who prayed the Rosary, said longtime family friend Kathy Schneeman. She said his deep Catholic faith was an important part of his character.

"That's what he would have liked. He talks about his faith just as much as he would talk about politics and current events with our group of friends," Schneeman said.

Flynn was born to an Irish Catholic family in St. Paul, the fifth of seven children. After graduating with an economics degree from the University of St. Thomas in 1988, he went to work as an account and sales marketing specialist with Kraft General Foods. That marketing background later came in handy as he promoted "Term Limits."

Wanting a new challenge, he quit Kraft in 1990 when he landed an aviation candidate slot with the Marine Corps, but he was later disqualified due to seizures he suffered following a childhood car accident. Thwarted from becoming a military aviator, he got the idea of writing thrillers.

"If (Tom) Clancy could do it, why can't I?" Flynn said in a 2005 interview with The Associated Press.

He went to work for the Twin Cities based commercial real estate company United Properties and started working on a book idea in his spare time. Two years later, he quit so he could devote more time to writing and moved to Colorado. He began working on what became "Term Limits," a story about assassins who targeted fat-cat congressmen.

Flynn was diagnosed with stage three metastatic prostate cancer in November 2010. The fatigue from his radiation treatments eventually made it difficult to focus on writing for more than an hour or two, and in October 2011, he reluctantly postp oned publication for several months of his 13th book, "Kill Shot," which followed Rapp's adventures as he pursued those responsible for the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Flynn is survived by his wife, Lysa Flynn, and three children.

Flynn's faith came through clearly in the protagonists of his novels.

In chapter 50 of one novel the leading character, Mitch Rapp, denounces the vilest type of abortion procedure.

In this chapter, Rapp–a CIA opperative–is before the Judiciary Committee. A certain female senator has it in for him because he uses extreme measures when he questions terrorists. (He is America’s assassin after all!) His morals, ethics and motives were being called into question. The fact that he and his partners have put their own lives at risk to save countless citizens of The United States does not impress this senator. Rapp explains that they have served their country with distinction, but she continues to build her indictment of them and calls Rapp’s actions immoral.

THE SENATOR SAYS, “I HARDLY THINK IT’S A STRETCH TO CONDEMN TORTURE AS AN IMMORAL ACT.”

RAPP COUNTERS HER WITH: “WHAT ABOUT PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION?”

AND THEN FURTHER DOWN THE PAGE RAPP ADDS:

“WHAT DO YOU THINK IS MORE MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE…DISLOCATING THE ARM OF A TERRORIST WHO HAS INTENTIONALLY LIED ON HIS IMMIGRATION APPLICATION SO HE CAN BECOME AN AMERICAN CITIZEN AND HELP KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE, OR STICKING A STEEL SPIKE INTO THE BRAIN OF AN EIGHT-AND-A-HALF-MONTH-OLD FETUS AND THEN SUCKING HIS BRAINS OUT.”

RAPP CONFRONTS THE SENATOR:

“YOU  HAVE A ONE HUNDRED PERCENT VOTING RECORD WHEN IT COMES TO A WOMAN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS. ON THIRTY-EIGHT SEPARATE OCCASIONS YOU HAVE VOTED TO PROTECT OR EXPAND PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTIONS AS WELL AS PROVIDE FEDERAL FUNDING FOR CLINICS THAT PERFORM THE PROCEDURE.”

THE SENATOR CONTINUES TO THINK OF HIM AS A BARBARIAN, SO HE REITERATES:

“HOW ABOUT STICKING A SPIKE THROUGH THE TOP OF A BABY’S HEAD, PIERCING THE SKULL, AND THEN SUCKING THE BABY’S BRAINS OUT ALL BECAUSE THE MOTHER GETS A NOTE FROM TWO DOCTORS WHO CLAIMS SHE HAS DEPRESSION, OR SOME OTHER MENTAL ISSUE THAT PRECLUDES HER FROM GIVING BIRTH TO A FULL-TERM BABY?”

WHEN THE SENATOR TELLS HIM THAT THE TWO ISSUES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, RAPP STATES:

“THIS IS WHERE WE NOT ONLY SAY IT’S PERFECTLY OKAY FOR A DOCTOR TO KILL A FULL-TERM BABY, BUT WE THINK TAXPAYERS SHOULD HELP PAY FOR IT. AND YOU CALL ME A BARBARIAN.”

“All of my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.” — Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor is considered the greatest American short-story writer of the 20th century. She won three O’Henry Awards while she was alive, and she was honored posthumously with the 1972 National Book Award after her death in 1964. Authors such as Alice Walker, Alice Munro and Cormac McCarthy, and musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Bono, have acknowledged her influence on their own work. How is it that a devout Catholic woman who was a daily communicant and a strong defender of the Catholic faith would have such impact on American culture and literature with stories that often feature grotesque characters encountering the harsh reality of truth and the mystery of divine grace?

While I was in the process of making a documentary film about O’Connor a few years ago, several areas of concern arose regarding O’Connor’s literary and spiritual legacy. Despite her contributions to American literature, those of us working on the film discovered that most high schools and colleges are no longer teaching her works. This is true in her home state of Georgia and in many other schools nationwide. Some instructors explained that O’Connor is perceived unfairly as racist and that they don’t feel comfortable including her stories in their English classes. (This was previously addressed by Pulitzer Prize winning author and fellow Georgia native Alice Walker, who wrote in her essay “A South Without Myths” that O’Connor’s stories were not racist. Wrote Walker: “But essential O’Connor is not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming, as it does, out of such a racial culture. If it can be said to be ‘about’ anything, then it is ‘about’ prophets and prophecy, ‘about’ revelation, and ‘about’ the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don’t have a chance of spiritual growth without it.”) Other educators reported that our culture is less religious now and that many students don’t have a sense of basic Christian theology; therefore, it is too time-consuming to provide a religious framework for the students to understand O’Connor’s stories, which are focused on difficult characters experiencing powerful spiritual epiphanies.

O’Connor often is described as a “Southern Gothic” writer. However, she preferred to describe herself as a “Christian Realist.” Her themes are universal and timeless, which is why it is surprising to learn that she is often absent from today’s academic curriculum. O’Connor’s short stories and personal letters address issues such as racism, immigration, Christian morality, salvation, the sacraments and spiritual awakening. Although most of her stories do not explicitly expound on Catholic theology or feature Catholic characters, her Catholic worldview is obvious. Additionally, in numerous personal letters, O’Connor defended the Catholic Church’s teachings on the Eucharist and purgatory, the ban on artificial contraception, and the sacrament of marriage.

Mary Flannery O’Connor was born March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, to Irish-Catholic parents, Edward and Regina (Cline) O’Connor. Although an only child, she was surrounded by a large family that included numerous aunts, uncles and cousins who had high intellectual and moral standards. Savannah had a larger Irish-Catholic population compared to other Southern cities, but anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish sentiment were still prevalent. O’Connor’s parents raised Flannery in the Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Lafayette Square, located near the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.

Flannery’s mother hailed from a prominent “Old Catholic” family from Milledgeville, in central Georgia, which was the former state capital. The Cline family resided in the former antebellum governor’s mansion. There, Flannery’s family attended the local Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which they built in 1874. The first Mass celebrated in Milledgeville was in the apartment of O’Connor’s great-grandfather Hugh Treanor in 1845. O’Connor’s official biographer, William Sessions, asserts that the Cline family had been friendly with General William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army and that they voted Republican due to their more sympathetic attitude toward African-Americans. The Cline family funded early schools for African-Americans in Savannah. Flannery’s grandfather Peter Cline was elected mayor of Milledgeville in 1889, and upon his death a local African-American pastor wrote a eulogy for him as a testament to his strong connection with the local African-American community.

O’Connor’s family would briefly relocate to Atlanta due to her father’s job when she was a high school freshman, but most of O’Connor’s high school and college years were spent in Milledgeville. When she was a teenager, O’Connor’s father died from lupus, a disease that later she would be diagnosed with at age 25.

O’Connor attended the prestigious University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop for graduate school where her skills as a powerful and talented writer would land her a contract with a publishing firm. Her prayer journal from graduate school reveals a writer striving to excel in her craft and to improve her relationship with God. She prayed, “please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate. I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith.” During this time, she would form important relationships with leading literary figures of her day. Just when she was achieving prominence as a young writer in New York City, O’Connor’s diagnosis of lupus eventually compelled her to move back home with her mother on the family farm, called Andalusia, in Milledgeville.

Her years at Andalusia would be her most productive as a writer despite suffering from the debilitating symptoms of lupus, as well as living under the same roof as her often overbearing mother. And she often found life in the parochial Georgia town to be stifling. The town, and O’Connor’s keen observation skills, would prove to be fertile ground in the creation of characters who face startling moments of truth in which their illusions of pride and self-righteousness are often destroyed in moments of violence. Wrote O’Connor, “I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”

Contemporary literary scholars have occasionally tried to portray O’Connor in more liberal ways. But like the Catholic faith itself, O’Connor cannot be easily described as “conservative” or “liberal.” O’Connor’s letters and daily prayer life demonstrate adherence to traditional Catholic morals and theological tenets.

A few years ago, a journalist tried to assert that because O’Connor was a close friend with a woman who was a lesbian, O’Connor must have been a lesbian herself. O’Connor’s letters describe homosexuality as an “impurity,” and although she maintained respectful and sincere friendships with women who were lesbians, she did not condone or engage in that lifestyle. Sessions relayed the story of O’Connor being invited to a “commitment ceremony” of two lesbian friends in New York City in the 1950s. O’Connor politely declined and explained to them that she believed that marriage was a sacrament between a man and a woman.

Throughout her adult life, O’Connor attended daily Mass and went to confession frequently. But being a devout Catholic didn’t mean that she was oblivious to the social changes occurring in American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Sessions explained that O’Connor’s short story “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” in which a woman is trying to ignore the fact that she is pregnant, was in response to the flippant way she heard secular New Yorkers discuss abortion when she was a young writer there. Highly moved by Hannah Arendt’s essays on the Holocaust and Arendt’s concept of “banality of evil,” O’Connor expressed concern for a culture where the devaluing of human life was acceptable. In the story “The Displaced Person,” O’Connor reflects the Catholic commitment to social justice and concern for refugees. In the stories “The River” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” O’Connor critiques secular humanists who seek solutions to human problems that ignore God and disregard the innate yearning that all individuals have for a relationship with the divine.

Flannery O’Connor stated that her Catholic sacramental view of life is what shaped her writing. She believed that God works in often disruptive and mysterious ways to bring his prodigal children back to him in unexpected moments of grace. By appreciating and reading how O’Connor described her stories, Catholics can better understand why it is essential that we restore her to our educational tradition and literary canon.

When she died of lupus in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine, Flannery O'Connor was already well known, and even controversial, as a Catholic writer of fiction. If her style of drastic distortion or Southern Grotesque, as she sometimes described it, left some people confused or even stunned, that was just the impact she wanted. Faith for her often meant an upheaval or rupture with what we take for granted about ourselves or about religion.

Her fame has soared in the decades since her death. Thomas Merton saw her as an equal of Sophocles. More than seventy books have been written on her work. When her essays and letters were published, they showed her to be the most theologically alert novelist of the entire century. She called herself a "hillbilly Thomist" who read Aquinas for twenty minutes every night before going to bed.

The iconic Nobel prize-winning novelist converted to Catholicism before his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer, although he allegedly received extreme unction on the battlefi eld while injured during the First World War. Jake Barnes, the central character and narrator of The Sun Also Rises, is a bad Catholic – much like Hemingway described himself (he disliked to be labelled a Catholic writer, but admitted that he “cannot imagine taking any other religion seriously”). His short story “Today is Friday” is a fascinating and farcical take on the evening after Christ’s crucifixion, and suggests that his self-effacing talk of religion masked a deeper, more paradoxical faith.

“I have never wanted to be known as a Catholic writer because I know the importance of setting an example — and I have never set a good example.” — Ernest Hemingway to Father Vincent Donavan, in an unpublished letter dated December 1927.

Among the many surprises in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s six-hour documentary on Ernest Hemingway are the accounts of Hemingway’s two adult conversions to Catholicism.

Most literary scholars do not take either of these conversions very seriously and see them as pressed upon Hemingway by family, friends, and circumstances. The conventional view is that Hemingway’s true “religion” —  insofar as he can be said to have one at all — is his famous “Code”: the idea made explicit in his interviews that in order to give meaning to life, one had to live by some set of ethical principles.

It could be “the code of the hunter,” or “the code of the bullfighter,” or even “the code of the sea.” It didn’t matter what code one chose — just as long as it provided rules for living a life of rectitude and dignity in an otherwise meaningless universe.

But if Hemingway’s conversions were sincere — and there is little reason to think they were not — then his “code” is not based on the agnosticism of a disillusioned existentialist, but rather on the comprehensive, universal affirmation of Christianity. 

Burns and Novick do not look very deeply into this possibility, even though they quote Hemingway himself as saying as much. Instead, they take Hemingway for the stoic adventurer and icon of American machismo that everybody else does.

Still, the fact that they bring up Hemingway’s Catholicism at all confirmed my own suspicions of a deeper, clear-eyed spiritual sensibility lurking behind all of Hemingway’s naturalistic plots — forcing me to reconsider everything I had previously thought about the man. That led me to two books: H.R. Stoneback’s groundbreaking work “In the Nominal Country of the Bogus: Hemingway’s Catholicism and the Biographers” (1991), and Matthew Nickel’s more recent “Hemingway’s Dark Night” (2013).

Both see Catholicism as playing a central role in Hemingway’s literary vision and moral landscape. And yet despite Burns’ penchant for pitting rival experts against one another to round out his analysis of complex subjects and people, neither Stoneback nor Nickel are cited or mentioned in his latest documentary.

This is an unfortunate omission, for part one of “Hemingway” promised a deep dive into Hemingway’s “invention” of the modern novel, which it never delivered. The episode instead turned away from the religious clues in his work to focus on his public image, war exploits, and psychological instability — all while missing that singularly under-reported and significant aspect of Hemingway’s life as a writer: his Catholicism.

Hemingway was raised in a Congregationalist Protestant home, and his first conversion to Catholicism occurred when he was a 19-year-old and volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. Two weeks into the job, he was delivering candy to soldiers on the frontlines when he was hit by machine-gun fire and more than 200 metal fragments from an exploding mortar round. An Italian priest recovered his body, baptized him right on the battlefield and gave him the last rites. 

Hemingway later described what happened this way:

“A big Austrian trench mortar bomb of the type that used to be called ash cans, exploded in the darkness. I died then. I felt my soul or something come right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.  It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.”

After having been anointed, Hemingway described himself as having become a “Super-Catholic.” It was a near-death experience that changed the course of his life. After the war, he went to work as a foreign correspondent in Paris. And eight years later — after his first marriage failed — he undertook a second, more formal conversion process in preparation for marriage to his second wife, devout Catholic Pauline Pfieffer.

It was at this time that Hemingway changed the title of his unpublished first novel, tentatively titled “Lost Generation,” to “The Sun Also Rises.” And writing to another friend, he declared, “If I am anything I am a Catholic . . . I cannot imagine taking any other religion seriously.”

He attended Mass (albeit irregularly) for the rest of his life and went on pilgrimages, received confession, had Masses said for friends and relatives, and raised his three sons as Catholics. Most of his novels are set in Catholic countries, and his last great hero (Santiago of “The Old Man and the Sea”) was a devout suffering servant, much in the cruciform mold of most of his heroes. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, he gave away the medal as a votive offering to “Our Lady of Cobre” in Havana.

Unfortunately, his subsequent divorces and additional marriages, drunken brawling, domestic abuse, poison pen letters, paranoia, megalomania, and habitual womanizing tarnished his youthful sense of himself as a “super-Catholic.” Hemingway never wanted to be known as a “Catholic writer” because he simply felt he couldn’t live up to the responsibility.

In a letter to his friend Father Vincent Donavan in 1927 just before he married his second wife, Hemingway wrote, “I have always had more faith than intelligence or knowledge and I have never wanted to be known as a Catholic writer because I know the importance of setting an example — and I have never set a good example.” 

Unlike James Joyce, Hemingway didn’t renounce his faith; and unlike Flannery O’Connor, he never promoted it. He thought of himself, like many of his protagonists (Nick Adams, Jake Barns, Robert Jordan, Francis McComber and Santiago), as a man struggling to live with grace and die a good death in a violent, unforgiving world where all of us must suffer.

The first time I read Hemingway’s books, I found an irrepressible piety and sense of the sacred permeating all his naturalistic plots. Had I known then about his Catholicism, it would have clarified things — and made the books better.

Think of the ending to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” — described so movingly by the late John McCain in the documentary — or even the parody of the Lord’s Prayer in the story “A Clear, Well-Lighted Place” — only this time knowing that the author of these works knew the Bible, prayed every day, and had studied St. John of the Cross in an original Spanish edition. It changes everything.

And although Hemingway never related to the surface aspects of American Catholic life, he wrote at least one work explicitly about Christ, “Today is Friday,” a dialogue between three Roman soldiers present at the crucifixion discussing how well Jesus had died and the grace he showed under pressure.

Knowing these things does not explain away all the troubling aspects of Hemingway’s egocentric personal life — his public inebriations, domestic abuse, womanizing, and suicide, but it helps me to understand the kinds of people Hemingway admired, their motivations and ideals, and the brave, virtuous person he was attempting to become.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote a poem the day after Hemingway killed himself titled “An Elegy for Ernest Hemingway.” It contains the lines: “You pass briefly through our midst. Your books and writings have not been consulted.” In other words, as I read it, the gifts he gave us are, for the most part, still unreceived.

American author Donna Tartt published her first novel, The Secret History, aged just 28 after receiving an advance of $450,000 from her publishers. Described as a “murder mystery in reverse”, the book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks and has since become an international bestseller and cult classic, having been translated into 30 languages. A practicing Catholic, Tartt was a bookish child, born and bred in Mississippi. She had her first sonnet published aged 13 and studied writing at Bennington College, Vermont, where she became friends with classmate Bret Easton Ellis. Her much-awaited third and most recent novel, The Goldfinch, won her the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2014. She is five feet tall, shy and reclusive and lives alone, and does not take part in book tours or give talks.

In  an essay Tartt wrote about her own faith, she affirmed: “As a novelist who happens to be a Roman Catholic, faith is vital in the process of making my work and in the reasons I am driven to make it.” 

But she acknowledged a “constant tension” between her religious beliefs and secular vocation, and explained why she is so careful about combining the two. Nothing is more damaging to fiction, she wrote, than writers who try to impose their beliefs on their novels in a forced or unnatural way. Therefore, writers should “shy from asserting those convictions directly in their work.” 

True to that vision,  The Goldfinch remains a largely secular story, and its characters often act as if God does not exist: They live for the moment, sin boldly, and speak in profane ways. Theo himself fluctuates between nihilism and hope, and compares his plight to the chained bird in  The Goldfinch , observing “what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.” 

And yet, echoes of the divine can still be found throughout  The Goldfinch , even within the often despondent Theo. They become apparent when Theo talks about his mother’s “visitation” to him in dreams, when Hobie speaks affectionately of the Catholic Church and the Jesuit priest who protected him as a youth, when the otherwise cynical Boris admits to being moved to tears by Biblical stories, and again when Theo opens up to the higher purpose in life, despite all its difficulties and insanities, toward the end of the novel. Tartt writes: 

Something in the spirit longs for meaning—longs to believe in a world order where nothing is purposeless, where character is more than chemistry, and people are something more than a random chaos of molecules. The novel can provide this kind of synthesis in microcosm . . . of a higher, invisible order of significance. 

It is rare to have a novelist offer such insights, and rarer still to have one realize those ideals. Donna Tartt’s  The Goldfinch is an exceptional book that achieves just that.

Scott Walker Hahn (born October 28, 1957) is an American Catholic theologian and Christian apologist. A former Protestant, Presbyterian minister who converted to Catholicism, Hahn's popular works include Rome Sweet Home and The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth. His lectures have been featured in multiple audio distributions through Lighthouse Catholic Media. Hahn is known for his research on Early Christianity during the Apostolic Age and various theoretical works concerning the early Church Fathers.

Hahn currently teaches at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a Catholic university in Steubenville, Ohio.[1] He has also lectured at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio. Hahn is married to Kimberly Hahn, who co-runs their Catholic apostolate, the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

Hahn received his B.A. degree magna cum laude in 1979 from Grove City College in Pennsylvania with a triple major of theology, philosophy and economics.[2] He obtained his M.Div. degree summa cum laude from Gordon–Conwell Theological Seminary in 1982. In May 1995, he was awarded a Ph.D. degree in systematic theology from Marquette University (Phi Beta Kappa).

Hahn's dissertation is titled "Kinship by Covenant: A Biblical Theological Analysis of Covenant Types and Texts in the Old and New Testaments". A version was published by Yale University Press in 2009 as Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God's Saving Promises.[3] Harvard professor Jon D. Levenson described it as "a learned and well-written volume interprets covenant as the red thread running through both testaments of the Christian Bible.

Dr. Scott Hahn was born in 1957, and has been married to his wife Kimberly since 1979. He and Kimberly have six children and are expecting their fifth grandchild. An exceptionally popular speaker and teacher, Dr. Hahn has delivered numerous talks nationally and internationally on a wide variety of topics related to Scripture and the Catholic faith. Hundreds of these talks have been produced on audio and videotapes by St. Joseph Communications. His talks have been effective in helping thousands of Protestants and fallen away Catholics to (re)embrace the Catholic faith.

He is currently a Professor of Theology and Scripture at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he has taught since 1990, and is the founder and director of the Saint Paul Center for Biblical Theology. In 2005, he was appointed as the Pope Benedict XVI Chair of Biblical Theology and Liturgical Proclamation at St. Vincent Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Hahn is also the bestselling author of numerous books including The Lamb’s Supper, Reasons to Believe, and Rome Sweet Home (co-authored with his wife, Kimberly). Some of his newest books are Many Are Called, Hope for Hard Times, The Catholic Bible Dictionary, Covenant and Communion, and Signs of Life.

Scott received his Bachelor of Arts degree with a triple-major in Theology, Philosophy, and Economics from Grove City College, Pennsylvania in 1979, his Masters of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Biblical Theology from Marquette University in 1995. Scott has ten years of youth and pastoral ministry experience in Protestant congregations (in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Kansas, and Virginia) and is a former Professor of Theology at Chesapeake Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1982 at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Virginia. He entered the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil, 1986.

Henry Graham Greene, (born October 2, 1904, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England—died April 3, 1991, Vevey, Switzerland), English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist whose novels treat life’s moral ambiguities in the context of contemporary political settings.

His father was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended for some years. After running away from school, he was sent to London to a psychoanalyst in whose house he lived while under treatment. After studying at Balliol College, Oxford, Greene converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926, partly through the influence of his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he married in 1927. He moved to London and worked for The Times as a copy editor from 1926 to 1930. His first published work was a book of verse, Babbling April (1925), and upon the modest success of his first novel, The Man Within (1929; adapted as the film The Smugglers, 1947), he quit The Times and worked as a film critic and literary editor for The Spectator until 1940. He then traveled widely for much of the next three decades as a freelance journalist, searching out locations for his novels in the process.

The world Greene’s characters inhabit is a fallen one, and the tone of his works emphasizes the presence of evil as a palpable force. His novels display a consistent preoccupation with sin and moral failure acted out in seedy locales characterized by danger, violence, and physical decay. Greene’s chief concern is the moral and spiritual struggles within individuals, but the larger political and social settings of his novels give such conflicts an enhanced resonance. His early novels depict a shabby Depression-stricken Europe sliding toward fascism and war, while many of his subsequent novels are set in remote locales undergoing wars, revolutions, or other political upheavals.

Despite the downbeat tone of much of his subject matter, Greene was in fact one of the most widely read British novelists of the 20th century. His books’ unusual popularity is partly due to his production of thrillers featuring crime and intrigue but more importantly to his superb gifts as a storyteller, especially his masterful selection of detail and his use of realistic dialogue in a fast-paced narrative. Throughout his career, Greene was fascinated by film, and he often emulated cinematic techniques in his writing. No other British writer of this period was as aware as Greene of the power and influence of cinema.

In 1981, in a collection of interviews with Marie-François Allain later published as The Other Man, Graham Greene admitted: "My life is marked by a succession of failures which left their traces on my work. I think they're the warp and weft of it." The moral terrain of Greene's novels, which he described as "the narrow boundary between loyalty and disloyalty, between fidelity and infidelity, the mind's contradictions, the paradox one carries within oneself," corroborates this admission. Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, which has been adroitly edited by Richard Greene (no relation), shows how the novelist's personal life also confirms Greene's unsparing self-assessment. But the letters further illustrate that nothing enabled Greene to understand the failure in his life and work more clearly than his Catholic faith.
 

Greene opened his autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), with a memorable sentence: "If I had known it, the whole future must have lain all the time along those Berkhamsted streets." This was incisive self-knowledge, for the tortures he underwent as the son of the headmaster of Berkhamsted School left psychological wounds that never healed. He recalled being subjected to "a system of mental torture" so traumatic that he actually tried to kill himself, most spectacularly by playing Russian roulette. This "bad period," as he always called it, deepened Greene's sense of the treachery in the human heart, and it is this which animates his greatest work.
 

Some of Greene's best letters were addressed to his mother, to whom he wrote with candor and warmth. As he admitted to Allain: "I loved and admired my mother precisely because she did not trespass on my privacy." Apropos his father, Greene wrote that he "never disputed by so much as a word my decision to become a Catholic," which was remarkable in an Englishman. After his father's death, Greene wrote his mother: "This may seem Popish superstition to you, or it may please you, that prayers are being said every day for Da in a West African church, & that rice is being distributed here in his name among people who live on rice & find it very hard to get."
 

In all his letters of condolence, whether to family or friends, Greene reaffirmed his Catholic faith by reaffirming that death is only an end to mortal life. When a Russian friend's husband committed suicide, Greene wrote,
 

I don't believe myself that death is everything, or rather my faith tells me that death is not the end of everything and when my faith wavers I tell myself that I am wrong. One can't believe 365 days a year . . . . There is a mystery which we won't be able to solve as long as we live. Personally even when I doubt I go on praying . . . . Why not try at night talking to your husband and telling him all you think. Who knows whether he mightn't be able to hear you and now with a mind unclouded.
 

The point is often made, mockingly, that Greene was a character in a Graham Greene novel, but here one sees that there was a truth to that which was anything but risible.

In 1926, Greene fell in love with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a recent convert to Catholicism, who introduced Greene to the Faith that he would keep, waveringly, for the rest of his life. When Greene confided in his young bride that "What I long for is a quite original marriage," she could scarcely have imagined the dance in which her husband would eventually lead her.

Lady Antonia Fraser the author of multiple histories, biographies and and works of fiction, including a series of detective novels. She converted to Catholicism of her own volition aged 14 following her parents, the Earl and Countess of Longford. As a pupil at St Mary’s School Ascot, she recalls insisting on “going to confession in front of the whole school”. She says that Catholicism has opened doors for her in her career. “I would never have written Mary, Queen of Scots had I not been a Catholic, or The Gunpowder Plot.” In 2019, she published her most recent history, The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, on the 1829 emancipation of Catholics, which won her the Catholic Herald book award. Her histories are eminently readable and meticulously researched.

Fraser’s warmth and welcoming approach are unsurprising: she is from a huge family, the eldest of eight children born to Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford, and his wife Elizabeth Harman, also an historian. On Sundays, Fraser goes to the Jesuits in Farm Street “because my father was converted by Father D’Arcy” (who, incidentally, was also responsible for receiving writer Evelyn Waugh into the Church). She has six children from her first marriage to Sir Hugh Fraser and many, many grandchildren and now great-grandchildren who feature frequently in her anecdotes. 

Does Catholicism survive among her progeny? “I can’t speak for them but my great-grandchildren have all had Catholic baptisms. One of my granddaughters got married in an Anglican church but with a Catholic priest.

J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, although his family had once been Baptists. He described The Lord of the Rings as rich in Christian symbolism, as he explained in a letter to his close friend and Jesuit priest, Robert Murray:[T 1]

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.[T 1]

The Tolkien scholar Patrick Curry writes that Tolkien's statement however elides the paganism that pervades the work; it may be fundamentally Christian, but on other levels it is another matter, with its pagan polytheism and animism, and many other features.[2] In other words, Middle-earth is both Christian and pagan.[3] The Tolkien scholar Paul H. Kocher comments that "having made the times pre-Christian, [Tolkien] has freed himself from the need to deal with them in a Christian context, which would be awkward if applied to elves, ents, dwarves, and the rest."[4]

Many theological themes underlie the narrative, including the battle of good versus evil, the triumph of humility over pride, and the activity of grace, as seen with Frodo's pity toward Gollum. The work includes the themes of death and immortality, mercy and pity, resurrection, salvation, repentance, self-sacrifice, free will, justice, fellowship, authority and healing. Tolkien mentions the Lord's Prayer, especially the line "And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil" in connection with Frodo's struggles against the power of the One Ring.[T 2] Tolkien said "Of course God is in The Lord of the Rings. The period was pre-Christian, but it was a monotheistic world", and when questioned who was the One God of Middle-earth, Tolkien replied "The one, of course! The book is about the world that God created – the actual world of this planet."[5]

The Bible and traditional Christian narrative also influenced The Silmarillion. The conflict between Melkor and Eru Ilúvatar parallels that between Satan and God.[6] Further, The Silmarillion tells of the creation and fall of the Elves, as Genesis tells of the creation and fall of Man.[7] As with all of Tolkien's works, The Silmarillion allows room for later Christian history, and one version of Tolkien's drafts even has Finrod, a character in The Silmarillion, speculating on the necessity of Eru Ilúvatar's eventual Incarnation to save Mankind.[T 3] A specifically Christian influence is the notion of the fall of man, which influenced the Ainulindalë, the Kinslaying at Alqualondë, and the fall of Númenor.JRR Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist and academic, best known as the author of the fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which are set in a prehistoric era in an invented version of our world which he called Middle-earth. He was a scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English, serving twice as professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. His mother was a convert to Catholicism and her son remained devout all his life.

Christianity is a central theme in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional works about Middle-earth, but the specifics are always kept hidden. This allows for the books' meaning to be personally interpreted by the reader, instead of the author detailing a strict, set meaning. 

J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic from boyhood, and he described The Lord of the Rings in particular as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision".[1][T 1] While he insisted it was not an allegory, it contains numerous themes from Christian theology. These include the battle of good versus evil, the triumph of humility over pride, and the activity of grace. A central theme is death and immortality, with light as a symbol of divine creation, but Tolkien's attitudes as to mercy and pity, resurrection, the Eucharist, salvation, repentance, self-sacrifice, free will, justice, fellowship, authority and healing can also be detected. Divine providence appears indirectly as the will of the Valar, godlike immortals, expressed subtly enough to avoid compromising people's free will.

There is no single Christ-figure comparable to C. S. Lewis's Aslan in his Narnia books, but the characters of Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn exemplify the threefold office, the prophetic, priestly, and kingly aspects of Christ respectively.

From the 1950s until now, readers of countless backgrounds and beliefs have been mesmerized by The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion. The name of J.R.R. Tolkien is known even to those who have no taste for fantasy literature.

Despite his fame, many fans of this literary genius are unaware that he was a devout Roman Catholic whose faith profoundly influenced his work. It was, in fact, Tolkien’s faith and frequent reception of the Sacraments that sustained him through the trials of personal life, the darkness of two world wars, the disappointment and suffering inflicted by members and leaders of the Church, and the scandal caused by destruction of the sacred liturgy.

Professor J.R.R. Tolkien: You speak of ‘sagging faith’…In the last resort faith is an act of the will, inspired by love. Our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings, folly, and even sins of the Church and its ministers, but I do not think that one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons (least of all anyone with any historical knowledge). ‘Scandal’ at most is an occasion of temptation—as indecency is to lust, which it does not make but arouses. It is convenient because it turns our eyes away from ourselves and our own faults to find a scapegoat…

I suppose the devil takes advantage of such scandal to keep us distracted by the sins of others, and to disturb our faith in Christ. What about our personal faults? Should we examine our own hearts, to see if we are striving to uphold the teachings of Jesus in our daily lives?

JRRT: The temptation to ‘unbelief’ (which really means rejection of Our Lord and His claims) is always there within us. Part of us longs to find an excuse for it outside of us. The stronger the inner temptation the more readily shall we be ‘scandalized’ by others. I think I am as sensitive as you (or any other Christian) to the ‘scandals’, both of clergy and laity. I have suffered grievously in my life from stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests; but I now know enough about myself to be aware that I [would] not leave the Church (which for me would mean leaving the allegiance of Our Lord) for any such reasons: I [would] leave because I did not believe…I [would] deny the Blessed Sacrament, that is; call Our Lord a fraud to His face.

So what you’re saying is, each and every one of us has the capacity to turn against Our Lord if we don’t humbly accept His grace. What would you say to someone outside the Catholic Church, who accuses Christ and His Church of fraudulence? 

JRRT: If He is a fraud and the Gospels fraudulent—that is: garbled accounts of a demented megalomaniac (which is the only alternative [to not believing Christ is truly God]), then of course the spectacle exhibited by the Church…in history and today is simply evidence of a gigantic fraud. If not, however, then this spectacle is alas! only what was to be expected: it began before Easter…

Meaning, it began when Judas Iscariot, one of the Apostles and someone who was called by Christ to follow Him, betrayed the Son of God to His enemies…even though he knew Christ was innocent. And yet we are supposed to have faith and hope even when confronted with such scandal?

JRRT: [I]t does not affect faith at all—except that we may and should be deeply grieved. But we should grieve on Our Lord’s behalf and for Him, associating ourselves with the scandalizers not the saints, not crying out that we cannot ‘take’ Judas Iscariot, or even the absurd and cowardly Simon Peter, or the silly women like James’ mother, trying to push her sons.

There are still scholars who insist that Christ never existed—that He is a fictitious character invented by religious fanatics. I think they will find this the easiest time to say to Catholics, “See! I told you so! The Church is a corrupt human institution, and Jesus was not a real person!”

JRRT: It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened’, and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded of him—so incapable of being ‘invented’ by anyone in the world at that time: such as ‘before Abraham came to be I am‘ (John viii). ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John ix); or the promulgation of the Blessed Sacrament… : ‘He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life’. We must therefore either believe in Him and in what he said and take the consequences; or reject him and take the consequences. I find it for myself difficult to believe that anyone who has ever been to Communion, even once, with at least right intention, can ever again reject Him without grave blame. (However, He alone knows each unique soul and its circumstances.)

These certainly aren’t days that permit lukewarm Catholicism. It now requires an extraordinary amount of courage and zeal to witness to our faith, as I’m sure you know personally.

JRRT: I know quite well that, to you as to me, the Church which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap. There is nowhere else to go! (I wonder if this desperate feeling, the last state of loyalty hanging on, was not, even more often than is actually recorded in the Gospels, felt by Our Lord’s followers in His earthly life-time?) I think there is nothing to do but to pray, for the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and for ourselves; and meanwhile to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.

What would you say to those who are leaving the Catholic Church and joining other churches?

JRRT: I myself am convinced by the Petrine claims, nor looking around the world does there seem much doubt which (if Christianity is true) is the True Church, the temple of the Spirit dying by living, corrupt but holy, self-reforming and rearising. But for me that Church of which the Pope is the acknowledged head on earth has as chief claim that it is the one that has (and still does) ever defended the Blessed Sacrament, and given it most honour, and put it (as Christ plainly intended) in the prime place. ‘Feed my sheep’ was His last charge to St. Peter; and since His words are always first to be understood literally, I suppose them to refer primarily to the Bread of Life.

And what advice do you have for Catholics who are sad, weary, discouraged, and struggling to keep faith?

JRRT: The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals…

It has been an honor to speak with you, Professor Tolkien. Thank you for your time. Do you have any parting words for our readers?

JRRT: Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament…There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all our loves on earth…eternal abundance, which every man’s heart desires.

Perhaps one of the best-selling living Catholic writers – he’s sold over 500 million books – Koontz converted to Catholicism in college, inspired by his future wife’s faith. “Catholicism permits a view of life that sees mystery and wonder in all things, which Protestantism does not easily allow,” he has said. “As a Catholic, I saw the world as being more mysterious, more organic and less mechanical than it had seemed to me previously, and I had a more direct connection with God.” Koontz affirms that his violent thrillers are about “our struggle as fallen souls, about the grace of God, but I never get on a soapbox about it. I’m first and foremost an entertainer.”

I met Gerda, my wife, when I was a senior in high school and she was a junior. We were from the same small town. She was Catholic. 

My house was a disaster zone, and a lot of people in my family were endlessly fighting with one another. When I started dating Gerda, it was amazing to me that all these people [in her family] got along. They were an Italian family. It was a different world that I was seeing. I began to associate it with Catholicism. 

Ultimately, I converted because the Catholic faith started appealing to me and gave me answers for my own life. I made the decision to convert during college.

Catholicism permits a view of life that sees mystery and wonder in all things, which Protestantism does not easily allow. As a Catholic, I saw the world as being more mysterious, more organic and less mechanical than it had seemed to me previously, and I had a more direct connection with God.

I feel about Catholicism as G.K. Chesterton did — that it encourages an exuberance, a joy about the gift of life. I think my conversion was a natural growth. Even in the darkest hours of my childhood, I was an irrepressible optimist, always able to find something to fill me with amazement, wonder and delight. When I came to the Catholic faith, it explained to me why I always had — and always should have — felt exuberant and full of hope.

Do you consider yourself a practicing Catholic?

Yes. Occasionally I’ve lapsed, as I suspect most of us do, but my faith only grows stronger with time. I can’t imagine that life could throw anything at me to change that.

In his spare time, Koontz wrote his first novel, Star Quest, which was published in 1968. Koontz went on to write over a dozen science fiction novels. Seeing the Catholic faith as a contrast to the chaos in his family, Koontz converted in college because faith provided existential answers for life; he admired Catholicism's "intellectual rigor," saying it permitted a view of life that saw mystery and wonder in all things.[8][9] He says he sees Catholicism as English writer and Catholic convert G. K. Chesterton did: that it encourages a "joy about the gift of life".[8] Koontz says that spirituality has always been part of his books, as are grace and our struggle as fallen souls, but he "never get[s] on a soapbox".[8]

In the 1970s, Koontz began writing suspense and horror fiction, both under his own name and several pseudonyms, sometimes publishing up to eight books a year. Koontz has stated that he began using pen names after several editors convinced him that authors who switched back and forth between different genres invariably fell victim to "negative crossover" (alienating established fans and simultaneously failing to pick up any new ones). Known pseudonyms used by Koontz during his career include Deanna Dwyer, K. R. Dwyer, Aaron Wolfe, David Axton, Brian Coffey, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Owen West, Richard Paige, and Anthony North. As Brian Coffey, he wrote the "Mike Tucker" trilogy (Blood Risk, Surrounded, Wall of Masks) in acknowledged tribute to the Parker novels of Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake). Many of Koontz's pseudonymous novels are now available under his real name. Many others remain suppressed by Koontz, who bought back the rights to ensure they could not be republished; he has, on occasion, said that he might revise some for republication, but only three have appeared — Demon Seed and Invasion were both heavily rewritten before they were republished, and Prison of Ice had certain sections bowdlerised.

After writing full-time for more than 10 years, Koontz had his acknowledged breakthrough novel with Whispers, published in 1980. The two books before that, The Key to Midnight and The Funhouse, also sold over a million copies, but were written under pen names. His first bestseller was Demon Seed, the sales of which picked up after the release of the film of the same name in 1977, and sold over two million copies in one year.[10] His first hardcover bestseller, which finally promised some financial stability and lifted him out of the midlist hit-and-miss range, was his book Strangers.[11] Since then, 12 hardcovers and 14 paperbacks written by Koontz have reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.[2]

Bestselling science fiction writer Brian Herbert has stated, "I even went through a phase where I read everything that Dean Koontz wrote, and in the process I learned a lot about characterization and building suspense."[12]

In 1997, psychologist Katherine Ramsland published an extensive biography of Koontz based on interviews with his family and him. This "psychobiography" (as Ramsland called it) often showed the conception of Koontz's characters and plots from events in his own life.[13]

Early author photos on the back of many of his novels show a balding Koontz with a mustache. After Koontz underwent hair transplantation surgery in the late 1990s, his subsequent books have featured a new, clean-shaven appearance with a fuller head of hair.[14] Koontz explained the change by claiming that he was tired of looking like G. Gordon Liddy.[15][16]

Many of his novels are set in and around Orange County, California. As of 2006, he lives there with his wife, Gerda (Cerra), in Newport Coast, California, behind the gates of Pelican Hills. In 2008, he was the world's sixth-most highly paid author, tied with John Grisham, at $25 million annually.[17]

In 2019, Koontz began publishing with Amazon Publishing. At the time of the announcement, Koontz was one of the company's most notable signings

The interviewer, Fred J. Eckert, describes the new novel, Devoted, as harnessing Koontz’s “gift for mesmerizing storytelling honoring essential virtues and values”. Without ever succumbing to the preachiness which is the death of all good storytelling, Mr. Koontz explains that his works explore “the divinely inspired moral imperative to love” that he says “we carry within us”. Mr. Eckert affirms that the works of Dean Koontz “celebrate the triumph of good over evil, the dignity of the individual, the hope of

becoming better, and the wonders of the world around us and within our minds”. If it is true that Mr. Koontz conveys all of this in his novels with a “gift for mesmerizing storytelling”, it is evident that my neglect of his work has indeed been a sin of omission.

“I want to extravagantly entertain readers,” says Mr. Koontz, “while making them feel the wonder of life and consider its profound mysteries. I want readers to feel that meaning – therefore hope – is woven into the fabric of the physical universe….” Having read this overarching philosophy, which breathes life into his work, we are not surprised to learn that Mr. Koontz is a believing Catholic, though I have no idea where he stands on what might be called the ecclesial spectrum. “Some writers without faith tend to produce works that are angry and despairing,” he states. “I’d rather never have been a writer than to spend my life in the grip of such negative emotions.” This is as good a guarantee as one could wish that his books are devoid of the nihilistic iconoclasm that possesses most modern fiction.

And what of his gifts as a writer? Is he proud or presumptuous after having published more than a hundred novels, which have been translated into 38 languages and which have sold collectively in excess of 500 million copies? “Talent is a grace,” he says. “Having done nothing to earn it, I feel a moral obligation to refine it and employ it to the greatest extent I can.” Though it’s not for me to judge, I’d be tempted to say that a writer who devotes this sort of humble service to the gifts-given, might be considered a good and worthy servant.

Another intriguing fact about Mr. Koontz’s deeper philosophy, which heartened me greatly, is his agreement with Vladimir Nabokov that the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Karl Mark were the two most evil influences on our own times. “Freud strove to relieve the individual of responsibility for his actions,” he explains, “and Marx strove to make each of us a servant of the state.” The evil that these ideas have wrought on contemporary society are plain for all to see. “The consequence of each ideology – and especially the two in concert – is mental disorder, moral insanity, society-wide despair, and mass murder.”

Mary Higgins Clark (born Mary Theresa Eleanor Higgins; December 24, 1927 – January 31, 2020)[1] was an American author of suspense novels. Each of her 51 books was a bestseller in the United States and various European countries, and all of her novels remained in print as of 2015, with her debut suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, in its seventy-fifth printing.

Higgins Clark began writing at an early age. After several years working as a secretary and copy editor, she spent a year as a stewardess for Pan-American Airlines before leaving her job to marry and start a family. She supplemented the family's income by writing short stories. After her husband died in 1964, Higgins Clark worked for many years writing four-minute radio scripts until her agent persuaded her to try writing novels. Her debut novel, a fictionalized account of the life of George Washington, did not sell well, and she decided to exploit her love of mystery/suspense novels. Her suspense novels became very popular, and have sold more than 100 million copies in the United States alone.[2] Her former daughter-in-law Mary Jane Clark is also a writer, as was her daughter Carol Higgins Clark.

Celebrated the world over as “The Queen of Suspense,” Clark was no less prolific in her good works. For her untold kindness, caring and generosity in support of the Friars of the Atonement and other charitable organizations, Clark also earned the title of “The Queen of Philanthropy.”

“I’ve been very active in a lot of charities because I firmly believe that much is expected of those to whom much has been given,” Clark said.

Clark showed extraordinary devotion to the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, generously supporting their good works at Graymoor and their worldwide ministries, including St. Christopher’s Inn—a homeless shelter and substance abuse treatment community—for nearly four decades. In 1999, she received the Graymoor Award for her service to the Friars, and, in 2015, the Friars granted Clark and her husband, the late John J. Conheeney, the honor of Affiliates of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement for “bearing witness to the Gospel in their daily lives by their use of time, talent, substance and opportunity for the good of others.”

Clark also consulted frequently with the Friars for their expert guidance on matters pertaining to the Catholic Church, which figured prominently in many of her novels, and Fr. Emil Tomaskovic, SA, Fr. Robert Warren, SA, and others in the order counted Clark as a close personal friend.

Clark wrote 56 best-selling books over a career spanning more than four decades, but arguably the greatest story she authored was that of her own life. A remarkable woman of strong Catholic faith, Clark beat the odds, overcoming enormous challenges and hardships to achieve the pinnacle of professional achievement in publishing, while also exhibiting a seemingly endless capacity for helping others, selflessly giving her money, time and energy to a host of charitable causes throughout her life. For her service to the Church, Clark was made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, a papal honor, a Dame of Malta and a Lady of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.

“Mary Higgins Clark gave incalculable joy to so many people around the world, and she was a great friend to the Catholic Church and the Friars of the Atonement and a tireless champion of many charitable causes,” said the Very Rev. Brian F. Terry, SA, Minister General. “We Friars join Mary’s family, friends and her countless fans around the world in mourning her passing and in celebrating her life and the many gifts she bestowed upon us all.”

Mary Higgins Clark’s books are worldwide best-sellers. In the United States alone, her books have sold more than 100 million copies.

Her most recent suspense novel, I’ve Got My Eyes on You, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2018. In 2014, she published the first in a series of collaborative novels with Alafair Burke, The Cinderella Murder, which was followed by All Dressed in White in 2015, The Sleeping Beauty Killer in 2016, and Every Breath You Take in 2017. She is the author of 38 previous best-selling suspense novels, four collections of short stories (the most recent, Death Wears a Beauty Mask), a historical novel, a memoir, and two children’s books. She is co-author, with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, of five suspense novels. Two of her novels were made into feature films and many of her other works into television films.

Active in Catholic affairs, Higgins Clark was made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, a papal honor. She is also a Dame of Malta and a Lady of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem. She received the Catholic Big Sisters Distinguished Service Award in 1998 and the Graymoor Award from the Franciscan Friars in 1999. Honors she has received include the Gold Medal of Honor from the American-Irish Historical Society (1993), the Bronx Legend Award (1999), the 2001 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the Passionist’s Ethics in Literature Award (2002), the first Reader’s Digest Author of the Year Award (2002), and the International Mystery Writers’ “First Lady of Mystery” Award (2008). She is an active advocate and participant in literacy programs.

A key element in most of Higgins Clark’s work is the presence of a strong, courageous — and Catholic — heroine who, while often accomplished and living the good life, triumphs over violence, intrigue and adversity to make things right in the end.

The appearance of priests, churches and Catholic schools is no accident in the Higgins Clark canon.

“My novels almost always have at the core of the story a strong young woman who is Catholic,” Higgins Clark said. “Her faith will help her persevere. In The Shadow of Your Smile and The Lost Years, Catholicism was a central element of the story versus the background of the central character.”

But does this make Higgins Clark a “Catholic writer” or a writer who happens to be Catholic?

“I’m a writer who happens to be Catholic,” she said. “It’s no surprise that the Catholic faith, which has played a large role in my life, will be a key influence on my characters.”

Kerouac said that he was “actually not ‘beat’ but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic,” and thought “beat” was more accurately conceived of as “beatific”. He referred to himself as a “lay Jesuit”. The cradle Catholic affirmed “all I write about is Jesus” and that his quintessential On the Road “was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God”. Kerouac was a nearly perfect nexus of American literary Catholicism: raised by immigrants whose French blurred into his English, steeped in Marian devotion, paradoxically drawn to both rebellion and tradition.

My days of being enamored with the enigmatic, guilt-laden Catholic author began after I witnessed Kerouac declare his faith to fellow Catholic William F. Buckley Jr. in front of a Firing Line audience that probably would never have expected an iota of orthodoxy from one of the founders of a countercultural revolution. Through his slurred words, he told Buckley that, as a Catholic, he believed in “order, tenderness, and piety.” In that same episode, he also lambasted the politicized hippie movement, targeting Ed Sanders, the “hippie-type” who was sharing the stage:

You make yourself famous by protest. I made myself famous by writing songs and lyrics about the beauty of the things that I did and the ugliness, too. You make yourself famous by saying, ‘Down with this down with that, throw eggs at this, throw eggs at that.’ Take it with you. I cannot use your refuse, you may have it back.

As Kerouac aged, he reclaimed the Catholic identity he had inherited from his devout parents, although to the reader, the influence was often muffled under the Benzedrine and booze-fueled bacchanalia of his youth, especially when in the company of characters such as cowboy-Casanova Neal Cassady, a close friend of his. Toward the end of his short life, he rediscovered the Marian prayers from his childhood, when he’d been an altar boy. He even became incensed when anyone suggested that his writing didn’t reflect his devotion. He once retorted, “All I write about is Jesus” during a 1968 interview with The Paris Review’s Ted Barrigan, who had asked why he never wrote about Jesus despite his observance of Christianity. He also said that On the Road, his magnum opus and a staple of modern American literature, “was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God.”

Kerouac’s conservative sentiments evolved with the hippie generation, and even though many on the left considered him a hero, he came to refer to them as the “Castro-jacketed New Left,” and he loathed the counterculture his writing inspired in the ’60s. He was fiercely anti-Communist and anti-liberal and was often described as both a nationalist and a patriot. He accused the “New Left” of not believing in “Western-style capitalism, private property, simple privacy even of individuals or families, for instance, or in Jesus or any cluster of reasons for honesty.”

He was angry at how his seemingly free-spirited and sybaritic works had been mischaracterized and co-opted by many leftists. To his chagrin, his fans focused on the superficial bliss of transience and capriciousness conveyed by his Proustian prose, and ignored its deeply religiously contemplative nature. Kerouac eventually condemned in strong terms his fellow beat writer and close friend Allen Ginsberg, who was a Marxist indulging “pro-Castro bullshit.” He ultimately became estranged from Ginsberg, although Ginsberg later claimed that Kerouac’s alienation was one-sided.

The vagabond life Kerouac popularized was also possible due to capitalism. In “After Me, the Deluge,” published posthumously in 1969, he wrote:

If it hadn’t been for Western-style capitalism . . . free economic byplay, movement north, south, east, and west, haggling, pricing, and the political balance of power carved into the U.S. Constitution . . . I wouldn’t have been able or allowed to hitchhike half broke thru 47 states of this Union and see the scene with my own eyes, unmolested.

As Kerouac approached death, he sought the solace of his faith especially through his mother, and he attempted to end his mercurial lifestyle by settling in St. Petersburg, Fla. He tried to return to regularly praying in the months before he died, when he was especially vulnerable and his health was ailing.

His years of binge drinking had cost him his mind and rotted him internally, and on October 21, 1969, he began coughing up his own blood — reportedly while reading one in a stack of National Reviews that he had sitting in his home.

Kerouac tried to highlight the spiritual context of his work to readers, but his audience often saw what they wanted to: a sense of purpose in an existence spent traversing the earth alongside friends who were similarly reckless and hedonistic, and all the excitement that follows the beatnik adventures. This lifestyle exhausted Kerouac and led to spiritual conflict and a penchant for solitude, but many of his fans idealized it as the script for a movement he didn’t support himself.

Kerouac was misunderstood by everyone around him, and it seems clear that he barely understood himself — he was a misfit among misfits. But even in his often-addled state of mind, he sought God and truth.

In his address to the mourners at Kerouac’s funeral, Father Armand Morissette said that the writer was “on the road once more, going further, alone by the waters of life.” Wherever he is, I hope he finds the peace that even the miles on the road couldn’t bring him.

The initial 1951 manuscript of “On the Road” was written on a continuous scroll, about 120 feet long, and when Bob Giroux, who had edited Kerouac’s first novel and who had also edited and published manuscripts by O’Connor and Thomas Merton (perhaps Kerouac’s closest spiritual brother), saw it he refused to publish it without extensive revisions, which Kerouac resisted. Portions of the book appeared in small magazines and anthologies, often under pseudonyms. Yet when Viking finally published the book in 1957, it became a best seller, even read by Jackie Kennedy, and remains today a classic of modern American literature.

The book is, along with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” one of the cornerstones of “Beat” writing. Kerouac had coined the term the Beat Generation, after hearing a friend use the expression Beat, meaning exhausted. But the Catholic Kerouac saw more in the word. As he recalled, during a visit to Lowell in 1954, he returned to the church of his youth, where he knelt alone in the silence. “And I suddenly realized, Beat means Beatitude! Beatific!” Later, he would go on to explain that “Because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten son to it.”

Though Kerouac wrote many other books, he will be forever remembered for “On the Road,” which he described as “really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found Him.” This would shock many of my students; it probably surprises anyone who has read this episodic story of sordid love affairs, drugs, jazz, fast cars and madness. In his own lifetime, critics and the media berated Kerouac as a degenerate, even when he claimed in all sincerity, “all I write about is Jesus.”

Now it must be noted that much of what Kerouac said, both privately and publicly, has to be considered carefully. For most of his life, Kerouac was sadly out of his mind—drunk, addled, and fatigued by work and fame. He often spoke without the benefit of foresight. Yet I think his Catholic instincts were deeply sincere. Friends often teased him about his Catholicism; though he did not practice the faith, he clearly thought about it all the time, and he frequently defended the Church to skeptics. Even in his deep inquiries into Buddhism and Eastern spirituality, an exploration he shared with his contemporary Merton, Kerouac saw mysticism from a Catholic perspective. It was ingrained in him. He proclaimed a devotion to both St. Joseph and especially St. Therese, whose “Little Way” intrigued him.

At the core of “On the Road,” and at the heart of all his work, is the Catholic and Beat insistence upon an underlying spirituality that inhabits all creation. Kerouac saw the world, and everything in it, as Holy. In his view, all experience was an opportunity to, as Wordsworth put it, “see into the life of things.” As Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty and all the other rogues, misfits and castaways of “On the Road” go tearing about the country in a wild ecstasy, their adventures of reckless abandon really become inquiries into what are the real values, truths and myths of America. What they expose is phony and sad. What they discover, at times, even amidst their youthful hedonism, is an idealism and a spirituality that endures not because of modern America but in spite of it.

As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, Kerouac reveals the “fantastic” inherent even within the mundane; to read “On the Road” with fresh appreciation is not unlike a careful reading or re-telling of the Christian stories that we sadly often take for granted. Yes, “On the Road” really needs to be read as it is by students; it needs to be read like converts hearing the Gospel for the first time.

Kerouac’s life is ultimately a tragedy; he had so much intelligence, so much talent, and he wasted more of that gift than he used. In the months before his death, he had begun a tentative return to the Church. As he explained, he rediscovered prayer, particularly the short Catholic Marian prayers of his youth. Every little prayer he offered to Mary kept him, he believed, from his destructive behaviors. He often went to Catholic churches, just to pray or kneel quietly. He might very well have fully embraced the Church again, though in some ways he had never really left it.

Kerouac died shortly after a sudden violent hemorrhage of his liver. His funeral Mass was held in Lowell at St. Jean Baptiste Cathedral. Father Armand “Spike” Morisette, who celebrated the Mass, beautifully linked the mystery of Kerouac’s life to Emmaus, saying of him the words from St. Luke’s Gospel, “Wasn’t it like a fire burning in us when he talked to us on the road?”