Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism. After an initial education in the United States, France, and England, he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance, and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he… received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time before his death. His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948); there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world, his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by. Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander," to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms race, to racial oppression. Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968.
M. Scott Peck, author and psychotherapist, was born on May 22, 1936 in New York City. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and was attending Middlebury College before being expelled for refusing to attend mandatory R.O.T.C. sessions. He transferred to Harvard, where he graduated in 1958, and then earned a M.D. in 1963 from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He was a psychiatrist in the United States Army for nearly 10 years, was the director of the New Milford Hospital Mental Heath Clinic, and worked in a private psychiatric practice in Connecticut. In 1984, he helped establish the Foundation for Community Encouragement, whose mission is to promote and teach the principles… of Community. He is among the founding fathers of the self-help genre of books. The Road Less Traveled, Peck's best known book, was a New York Times bestseller for a decade. His works deal with helping people and bringing about a lasting peace for mankind. He is the recipient of the 1984 Kaleidoscope Award for Peacemaking, the 1994 Temple International Peace Prize, and the Learning, Faith and Freedom Medal from Georgetown University in 1996. He died on September 25, 2005 at the age of 69.