Is The Seven Storey Mountain on Kindle Unlimited?

No. The Seven Storey Mountain was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on September 6, 2026.

What formats is The Seven Storey Mountain available in?

On Amazon, The Seven Storey Mountain comes as a paperback.

Our review

The Seven Storey Mountain

Name: The Seven Storey Mountain
Author: Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton

4.5/ 5 · Outstanding

Thomas Merton's spiritual autobiography tells how a worldly, restless young intellectual gave up everything to become a Trappist monk. Beautifully written and searchingly honest, The Seven Storey Mountain is the rare conversion story that reads like literature, not testimony.

Get the book on Amazon

Paperback

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

The Review

Our take

Merton wrote this in his early thirties, not long after entering the monastery, and the book has the heat of someone reckoning with a life still close behind him. He was no cradle saint. The early chapters follow a rootless, clever, pleasure-seeking young man bouncing between France, England, and America, burning through enthusiasms, sampling ideas the way some people sample cities. What makes it gripping is that Merton renders that earlier self without flattery and without easy contempt. He understands the appetites he later renounced, and he writes about them with enough sympathy that you feel the pull of the world he eventually walked away from.

The spine of the book is conversion, but Merton is too good a writer to make it tidy. His turn toward Catholicism, and then toward the radical silence of the Trappists at Gethsemani, comes in fits and reversals, through books and friendships and a growing, almost physical hunger for something the world wasn't giving him. He's candid about his own resistance, his vanity, the long stretches where grace seemed to be working on him against his will. That honesty is the book's engine. Even a reader with no religious commitment can follow the human drama of a man slowly discovering what he is actually for.

And the prose is genuinely beautiful. Merton had a poet's ear and a contemplative's patience, and the writing moves between vivid memoir and passages of real spiritual depth without ever feeling like a sermon. His descriptions of place — wartime New York, the French countryside, the bare austerity of the monastery — are exact and alive. When the book turns inward, toward prayer and silence and the meaning of a vocation, it stays grounded in concrete experience rather than abstraction. It helped make monastic and contemplative life intelligible to a vast secular audience, many of whom had never given a thought to a monastery, and it launched Merton as one of the most widely read spiritual writers of his century.

Why you should read

Readers who love literary memoir and conversion stories
Anyone curious about monastic or contemplative life
Fans of beautifully written spiritual nonfiction
Believers and secular readers drawn to an honest inner journey

What to expect

A vivid coming-of-age before the conversion
Honest, unflattering self-portraiture
Poetic, contemplative prose
A grounded account of monastic life

It is, in places, a book of its moment, and worth meeting on its own terms. The young Merton can be sweeping and a little certain in his judgments, the Catholic apologetics of the middle chapters are firmly of the 1940s, and the final stretch, written from inside his early fervor, runs warmer and more pious than the searching sections that precede it. Readers looking purely for narrative may wish he lingered less on doctrine. But take it as what it is — one man's unusually articulate account of giving his whole life to a single question — and it remains a moving, durable classic, as alive now as when it first sent a generation reaching toward the contemplative life.

Reviewed by Jordan · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Get the book on Amazon

Paperback

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Where to read or listen

Is The Seven Storey Mountain on Kindle Unlimited?: No. The Seven Storey Mountain was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on September 6, 2026.
What formats is The Seven Storey Mountain available in?: On Amazon, The Seven Storey Mountain comes as a paperback.

Filed underReligion Memoir Browse the archive →

Common questions

What is The Seven Storey Mountain about?: Merton wrote this in his early thirties, not long after entering the monastery, and the book has the heat of someone reckoning with a life still close behind him. He was no cradle saint. The early chapters follow a rootless, clever, pleasure-seeking young man bouncing between France, England, and…
Is The Seven Storey Mountain worth reading?: We scored The Seven Storey Mountain 4.5 out of 5. Thomas Merton's spiritual autobiography tells how a worldly, restless young intellectual gave up everything to become a Trappist monk. Beautifully written and searchingly honest, The Seven Storey Mountain is the rare conversion story that reads like literature, not testimony.

Related books

View all

Swan Song: Diana, My Sister

Charles Spencer

A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

Marcus Luttrell

Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Pema Chodron

Confessions (Oxford World's Classics)

Saint Augustine

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain

You with the Sad Eyes

Christina Applegate