At least I picked up the Gilead book today.

But I didn't get much further than that the book was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I remembered that third name explicitly from Seven Storey Mountain.

Not that Bob Giroux is mentioned in the memoir as several other Bobs are. He was the editor of Merton's book. And, gee, he died last year while living in Tinton Falls.

Here's an excerpt from Seven Storey Mountain:

Huxley was thought, by some people, to be on the point of entering the Church, but Ends and Means was written by a man who was not at ease with Catholicism. He quoted St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila indiscriminately with less orthodox Christian writers like Meister Eckhart: and on the whole he preferred the Orient. It seems to me that in discarding his family's tradition of materialism he had followed the old Protestant groove back into the heresies that make the material creation evil of itself, although I do not remember enough about him to accuse him of formally holding such a thing. Nevertheless, that would account for his sympathy for Buddhism, and for the nihilistic character which he preferred to give to his mysticism and even to his ethics. This also made him suspicious, as the Albigensians had been, and for the same reason, of the Sacraments and Liturgical life of the Church, and also of doctrines like the Incarnation.