New Releases by John Howard Griffin

The companion volume to the 50th-anniversary edition of Black Like Me, this book features John Howard Griffin's later writings on racism and spirituality. Conveying a progressive evolution in thinking, it further explores Griffin's ethical stand in the human rights struggle and nonviolent pursuit of equality—a view he shared with greats such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thomas Merton. Enlightening and forthright, this record also focuses on Griffin's spiritual grounding in the Catholic monastic tradition, discussing the illuminating meditations on suffering and the author's own reflections on communication, justice, and dying.

In 1969, one year after Thomas Merton's tragic (and suspicious) death, John Howard Griffin was invited to write a biography of America's most famous monk, a monk who strangely had become a best-selling theologian. The result was Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton (1983). Both Merton and Griffin were converts to Catholicism, and they had become fast friends during Griffin's occasional retreats to the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani where Merton was cloistered. As Robert Bonazzi writes in his Foreword, "With natural humility and intense spirituality, they taught each other by example and silence." Merton and Griffin were both photographers as well as writers. Griffin wrote about Merton's painting and photography in A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton (1970). They also shared a fascination with the French theologian Jacques Maritain, as well as French modernists Pierre Reverdy, George Braque, and Albert Camus. Griffin fell ill before he could finish his biography of Merton, and the mantle of official biographer passed to Michael Mott, author of The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, an essential compendium of the monk's life. Yet Follow the Ecstasy gets closer to the man—a portrait made by one who shared not only personal histories and interests with Merton, but an "intuitive perspective of solitude."

No less a critic than Clifton Fadiman called The Devil Rides Outside a "staggering novel." The first novel of John H. Griffin, it written during the author's decade of blindness following an injury suffered during the closing days of World War II. As Time Magazine described it, The Devil Rides Outside "has some things relatively rare in U.S. letters: energy, earnestness and unashamed religious fervor." Written as a diary, the novel relates the intellectual and spiritual battles of a young American musicologist who is studying Gregorian chant in a French Benedictine monastery. Even though he is not Catholic, he must live like the monks, sleeping in a cold stone cell, eating poor food, sharing latrine duties. His dreams rage with memories of his Paris mistress; his days are spent being encouraged by the monks to seek God. He takes up residence outside the monastery after an illness, but he finds the village a slough of greed and pettiness and temptation. Indeed, as the French proverb says, "the devil rides outside the monastery walls."

This never before published memoir by the author of "Black Like Me" is an extraordinary chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit.

Culled from previously unpublished material, this collection of writing and photography by John Howard Griffin was taken from the period during which he was writing and revising what would be his most famous book, the bestselling Black Like Me. Living in exile in Mexico at the time, along with his young family and aging parents, Griffin had been forced from his home town of Mansfield, Texas, by death threats from local white racists. Knowing that he would become a controversial public figure once he returned to the states, he kept an intimate journal of his ethical queries on racism and injustice—and to escape from his worries he also immersed himself in the culture of the Tarascan Indians of Michoacan. Accordingly, Robert Bonazzi's introduction contains substantial unpublished portions of the journals, and the main body of the book is made up of three essays by Griffin—one on photography and two about trips he made to photograph rural Mexico.

Griffin turned himself into a black man to experience the sting of prejudice firsthand.

"0n the Street of the Seven Angels in Paris, we find a gathering of humanity's finest and most frivolous. The Paris bookseller, Charles Edmund Dantes Durand; the liberal-minded, generous monks of a poor Dominican monastery; Madame Culuhac, the personally abstemious owner of the local whorehouse; the Mademoiselle Mailleferre, whose Religious Arts Shop is the headquarters for the newly formed Société for the Preservation of Christian Morality Against Contemporary Indecency; and a host of other finely delineated characters and caricatures. The Société stations a catty collection of spinsters and housewives to spy on their neighbors, resulting in an hilarious citizen's arrest and a revealing censorship trial that intrigues all of Paris. As Jonathan Kozol writes of this novel, "the literary magic here is in the vivid details. I felt I was back in Paris once again after so many years, and followed the delicious story of Durand (a wonderful creation!) as if I were walking with him through the city""--Jacket flap.

This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.

Originally published under the title, Follow the Ecstasy, this book provides an intimate look at the last, critical years of Thomas Merton's life. This period coincided with the monk's long-sought permission to withdraw to a hermitage on the monastery grounds of Gethsemani.