Whitness to Freedom is the fifth and final volume of Thomas Merton's correspondence, joining the Hidden Ground of Love, The Road to Joy, The School of Charity, and The Courage for Truth. This collection spans four decades, from 1936 to 1968. Most of the letters, however, were written in the late '50's and early '60's, a period during which Merton experienced two serious crises in his life and vocation; one in 1959, when the Vatican denied his petition to leave the Abbey of Gethsemani to seek out "a more solitary primitive existence in a monastic life" outside the United States; the other in 1962, when he was forbidden to publish anything on the "controversial" topic of war and peace. Merton's correspondents here include his abbot and other Church authorities, his dear friend and literary agent Naomi Burton Stone, his teacher and fellow poet Mark Van Doren, folksinger Joan Baez, ecologist Rachel Carson, scientitst Leo Szilard, French Islamic scholar Louis Massignon, Dr.Benjamin Spock, Clare Boothe Luce, and a host of others...

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