Seven Storey Mountain the autobiography of Thomas Merton Thomas Merton, by his own account, did not live his early years like a man called to, suited for, or even interested in religious life. He had experienced many of the so-called finer things the world had to offer him—the son of artists, he had traveled extensively in his youth, lived with wealthy relatives, and attended the best universities. Before his conversion to Catholicism, Merton had enjoyed a life divided between intellectual discussion and drunken revelry. What he found behind both his noblest and basest pursuits was an attempt to serve his own pride. None of it cured his dissatisfaction with a world he'd once been so eager to conquer. By his twenties, Merton had already encountered enough ambition, success, and reckless abandon to know his world had nothing in real freedom or happiness to offer him. So he left it all behind, and entered a Trappist monastery. The Seven Storey Mountain is a personal account of how Merton learned what the rewards of a selfish, worldly life were, and how he entered the monastery when he learned those rewards would never be enough to satisfy him.
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