The Monk's Record Player
Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966
- 263 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
The story of a monk, a minstrel, and the music that brought them together In 1965 writer-activist-monk Thomas Merton fulfilled a twenty-four-year dream and went to live as a hermit beyond the walls of his Trappist monastery. Seven months later, after a secret romance with a woman half his age, he was in danger of losing it all. Yet on the very day that his abbot uncovered the affair, Merton found solace in an unlikely place—the songs of Bob Dylan, who, as fate would have it, was experiencing his own personal and creative crises during the summer of 1966.
In this striking parallel biography of two countercultural icons, Robert Hudson plumbs the depths of Dylan’s surprising influence on Merton’s life and writing, recounts each man’s interactions with the woman who linked them together—Joan Baez—and shows how each transcended his immediate troubles and went on to new heights of spiritual and artistic genius. Readers will discover here a riveting story of creativity and crisis, burnout and redemption, in the tumultuous era of 1960s America.
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Table of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword by David Dalton
- Introduction
- Prologue: Sunday, March 6, 1966
- Part One: Utopian Hermit Monk (April 1941 to August 1965)
- Part Two: She Speaks Like Silence (March to July 1966)
- Part Three: The Lonesome Sparrow Sings (July 1966 to October 1968)
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Credits and Permissions
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index