Berkley Center

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) by Paul Elie is recognized as a classic in Catholic writing and in the literature of religion in America. It is a group portrait of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day, American Catholic writers whose lives and work converged at crucial points. The book was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for First Nonfiction, the Beliefnet Book of the Year prize, a Christopher Award, and Modern Language Association prizes in the fields of Christianity and Literature and the Literature of the South, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in biography.