The books listed here will help make clear what it is that good literature is meant to do and why what so often passes for literature these days fails to live up to that high calling.

If a Christian were asked to point to the books in American literature that portray a good Christian - someone of whom one might say, "yes, that is a portrait; that is the sort of soul I aspire to be" - there are no better portraits than those in the novels of Willa Cather, and few competitors.

Flannery O'Connor wrote out of a deep, thoroughly Catholic vision of life, and saw her vocation of writing as essentially telling stories to uncover "mystery through manners, grace through nature."

When Andre Dubus passed away in his Haverhill, Massachusetts home on February 25, obituaries noted the loss of one of America's finest writers of the short story and certainly one of the most interesting and inspiring figures on the contemporary literary scene.

It is not possible within the scope of this presentation to give an historical account of the origins of the Catholic Intellectual Renaissance and its influence on modern thought.

Alice Taylor is one of Ireland's best-kept secrets. Although the fifty-eight-year-old housewife from County Cork is well known in her own country as the author of To School Through the Fields, the best-selling book in Ireland's history, most Americans have never heard of her or of her runaway bestseller.

Chesterton is often called the most quoted man in English; he was certainly one of the most prolific.

The tension between art and faith in the work of a novelist who happens to be a Catholic is nothing new.

As in the nineteenth century so in the twentieth, a number of laymen and women have appeared in the firmament of intellect and the arts to place the entire body of Christians in their debt.

Then I baptized him, and the next day I brought him Communion. It was just a few days later that he died. He seemed very much at peace, and he would say, `Now I'm in the fold.'