Guide 01 Writing on faith independent information
Catholic authors of the 20th century: who to read and why
The twentieth century produced an unusual number of major writers for whom Catholic faith was a subject, a struggle or a way of seeing. This guide sticks to titles and dates that are well documented.
Why the 20th century
A list of Catholic authors can mean three different things: writers who were Catholic, writers who wrote about Catholic life, and writers whose work is read as Catholic in its imagination. These overlap but are not the same. A novelist can be baptised and never mention the Church, and another can be a convert who writes about priests and sinners in nearly every book.
This page uses the middle meaning. It lists authors whose Catholic faith is widely discussed in connection with their books, and it names only works whose titles and dates are easy to check. Living authors are left out on purpose, so the record stays settled.
England and Ireland
G. K. Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church in 1922. His Father Brown stories, which began to appear in 1910, feature a village priest who solves crimes by understanding people, and his book Orthodoxy dates from 1908. Hilaire Belloc, his friend and collaborator, wrote verse, history and the travel book The Path to Rome (1902).
Graham Greene became a Catholic in 1926. The Power and the Glory (1940) follows a hunted priest in Mexico, and The Heart of the Matter appeared in 1948. Evelyn Waugh was received in 1930 and published Brideshead Revisited in 1945. Muriel Spark was received in 1954 and wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). J. R. R. Tolkien was a practising Catholic all his life, and he described The Lord of the Rings in a 1953 letter as a work that is religious at its root, though it contains no church or ritual.
France and Norway
In France, Georges Bernanos published Diary of a Country Priest in 1936, a spare novel told through a young priest's notebook. François Mauriac, who wrote novels of family and conscience, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952.
Sigrid Undset of Norway received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. Her medieval trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter was published in the early 1920s, and she was received into the Catholic Church in 1924.
The United States
Flannery O'Connor, who lived in Georgia and died in 1964 aged thirty-nine, wrote the novel Wise Blood (1952) and the story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). Her essays, collected after her death as Mystery and Manners, explain how a Catholic writer can make grace visible through rough, comic and often violent stories.
Walker Percy, a physician turned novelist, became a Catholic in 1947 and won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, published in 1961. Thomas Merton's autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain appeared in 1948 and Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness in 1952. Both belong more to spiritual memoir than to fiction, a form covered in the guide to writing a spiritual memoir.
Japan and wider voices
Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic novelist, published Silence in 1966, a novel about missionaries and persecution in seventeenth-century Japan. It shows that Catholic literature was never only English or European, and that doubt and faith can sit in the same paragraph.
How to start reading
Pick by temperament. If you like comedy and a sharp edge, begin with a short O'Connor story. If you like moral suspense, try The Power and the Glory. If you like long, humane historical fiction, try Kristin Lavransdatter. For the wider story of how these writers relate, read the Catholic literary revival.
Writers can also read them as teachers. Watch where each author places the sacred inside ordinary scenes, and how rarely they explain it. That habit is the subject of the guide to writing Christian fiction that does not preach.