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John Beecher was a poet whose works often expressed social concerns such as civil rights, non-violence, and workers' rights. During the 1960's, his work on the publication «Ramparts» got him dubbed a "Communist" by Governor George Wallace of Alabama, which Beecher claimed was an "honor". He would return to Alabama, where he claimed the KKK wanted him dead, in 1966 to serve as a visiting professor at Miles College, a traditionally black institution. He and his wife Barbara were received back to the Catholic Church in 1965, and he describes the changes in the Church in Birmingham since his boyhood days there. He and Barbara were also art printers, and Merton approached them to do specialty additions of some of his work.

Teris Benaudes is writing from Lima, Peru.

Cintio Vitier is a poet, anthologist and literary critic from Havana, Cuba. His early poetry was influenced by the Spanish Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez. In the late 1950's and 1960's, the Cuban Revolution changed his style. Vitier later credited Merton with giving him spiritual and political guidance during the 1960's. (Source: «The Courage for Truth», p. 235.)

Vladimír Vyhlídka was was from Czechoslovakia. He studied for the priesthood in Rome, returned to Czechoslovakia, and later was made a monsignor. He died in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2011.

C. Anthony has served as president and a corporate director of a number of companies after beginning a career in advertising. He is also a board member of many charities. Having studied journalism in college, he continues to writes books, articles and recurring columns.

Fr. V. Walgrave was a Dominican priest from Ghent, Belgium. He often traveled to the United States to preach at retreats and was at the Dominican Motherhouse of St. Mary of the Springs in Columbus, Ohio, at the time of writing to Merton.

Gerald Walker writes from New York.

Susan E. Walker was secretary to Dr. J. Edward Dirks of Yale University Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.

Richard J. Walsh was Director of Television for the National Council of Catholic Men in New York.

Fr. Walter was a Dominican priest from Australia.

E. I. Watkin was an Oxford-educated scholar, philosopher, prolific writer, linguist and translator who was proficient in French, Italian, Spanish and German. He was born a Protestant, moved to the Anglo-Catholics in his teenage years, and became Roman Catholic in 1908. He was concerned about the rise of secularism, but believed in taking Catholicism beyond its surface teachings to profound philosophical and mystical ends. He sometimes ran into trouble with church authority in his approach.

Fr. Joseph Raymond Watt was a former monk of Gethsemani Abbey under the religious name of Fr. Marion during the 1950's. At some point he left the monastery for parish life and spent many years in the Monterey Diocese in California. After he died, he was cremated and his ashes were returned to Gethsemani Abbey. (Source: "The Rev. Joseph Watt". Obituaries section of the Santa Cruz Sentinal Online. 16 Aug. 2002. Accessed 31 Aug. 2006 at the Bellarmine University Library. ‹http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2002/August/16/obit/obit.htm›.)

Dorothy Wayman was a journalist and author. Born in California, she came east for her higher education, graduating from the Boston School of Social Work in 1914. After travel to Japan, which became the subject of a book under the pseudonym Theodate Geoffrey, she returned to the Boston area. While corresponding with Merton she was a staff reporter for the «Boston Globe». (Source: "The American Catholic Who's Who." Volume 14: 1960-61. Grosse Pointe, MI: Walter Romig Publisher; p. 471.)

Rembert Weakland was a Benedictine monk and former Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Confederation, starting his first term in 1967, the year before meeting Merton in Thailand. He served as Archbishop of Milwaukee from 1977-2002.

Portia Webster was a postulant for Redwoods Monastery in California when Merton met her during his travels on the west coast. At the time, she was working at a JC Penney store in San Francisco. She was one of the people to help show him around San Francisco in his last days before leaving for Asia. She now lives as a lay hermit artist at a monastery in Arizona.

Ron Webster writes from Spokane, Washington.

Frances "Tootie" Wesselmann was married to Robert G. Wesselmann.

Fred D. Wieck was an editor from Harper and Row in New York.

John Wilkins was an editor who writes first from the magazine «Frontier» and then from the Catholic magazine, «The Tablet» of London, England.

Thomas Williams was formerly a novice of Gethsemani. Merton writes to him in 1964, after he had recently left the monastery.

Brian Wilson writes from Seoul, South Korea. Like Merton, he was an alumnus of Columbia University. He read «Seven Storey Mountain» in 1955 and was a fan of many of Merton's other books. After completing a Master's degree in anthropology from Stanford University in 1959, he took a job teaching English at the Foreign Language College of Korea. Appalled by conditions in the country, especially the plight of children, he began work to help Korean children.

J. F. Yañez writes from Universitas, a company of literary agents from Barcelona, Spain.

Alfred F. Young was a history professor at Northwestern University. He co-signs the letter with another history professor, Christopher Lasch, of Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois.

Peggy Young writes on behalf of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, in New York.

June Yungblut is a Quaker and scholar with graduate degrees from Yale and Emory. Her ancestry with the Society of Friends (Quakers) dates back to Thomas Fitzwater, who came to America aboard the Welcome alongside William Penn. At the time of writing to Merton, she was co-director of the Quaker House in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband John Yungblut. She and her husband were involved in the Civil Rights Movement and were friends of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. June Yungblut attempted to arrange a retreat for Martin Luther King, Jr. at Gethsemani Abbey; however, King was not able to come because of the situation in Memphis which culminated in his assassination. (Source: «The Hidden Ground of Love», p. 635.)

Willy Eurlings is chairperson of the Mertonvrienden, the Dutch-speaking Merton Society from Flanders and the Netherlands.

A student of Sr. Marialein Lorenz in Mobile, Alabama, Gloria Sylvester Bennett was part of the class who sent Merton some ordination gifts. She sends a book by her husband, Lerone Bennett, «Confrontation: Black and White». (Source: «The Road to Joy», p. 341.)

Passionist priest, writer, and scholar, Thomas Berry shared an interest with Merton in Asian spiritual traditions and both wrote on the subject. Later describing himself as a "geologian", Fr. Berry would achieve more prominence for his writings on deep ecology and ecospirituality.

Jim Best was Director of Publications for the Fellowship of Reconciliation in New York and their magazine «Fellowship».

Dom Colomban Bissey served as Abbot of Melleray in France, the mother house of the Abbey of Gethsemani, from 1958-1986. He conducted visitations to Gethsemani as he was Gethsemani's Father Immediate.

At the time of writing, Fon W. Boardman, Jr. was Vice-President of Oxford University Press in New York.

Dr. C. W. van Boekel is writing from the Netherlands on behalf of the Dutch periodical «Ons Geestelijk Leven»

Merton remembered Nancy Hauck Boettcher when he was young and she was a baby in Long Island. After the death of Merton's mother Ruth in 1921, Nancy's grandmother, Freida "Nanny" Hauck came to help Merton's grandparents take care of Thomas and John Paul Merton. Nancy's aunt Elsie married Merton's uncle Harold Jenkins. Harold and Elsie took care of Nanny Hauck at first. According to Nancy, they "threw her out of their house", and she came to live with Walter and Ruth Hauck, Nancy's parents. The difficult situation of her parents taking care of Nanny is the subject of the first letter. At this time, Nancy was married, had a couple of children, and was unable to assist her parents with the care of Nanny. (Source: «The Road to Joy», pp. 57 and 65.)

Jan Boggs was a sophomore at Niskayuna High School in New York.

Fr. Gregory was a Benedictine at Mount Saviour Monastery near Elmira, New York. He went with Dom Aelred Wall to Abiquiu, New Mexico, to found the Monastery of Christ in the Desert.

Fr. Paul Bourne was the head censor (now called "reader") of the Cistercian Order and needed to approve of Merton's writings before he received the «Imprimi Potest», or permission to publish, from his Order and the Church. He was more considerably more friendly with Merton and more lenient of his works than other censors. Fr. Paul was at Our Lady of the Holy Ghost Abbey (now called the Monastery of the Holy Spirit) in Conyers, Georgia. (Source: «The School of Charity», p. 168.)

Fr. Charles Bowers was at the Chaplain's Residence of Lidcombe Hospital in Lidcombe, Australia at the time of writing.

Tony Boyd was a seventh-grader writing from Ashland, Kentucky.

The following memorial for Mahanambrata Brahmachari was written after his death in 1999 by Francis X. Clooney, SJ: Bankim Dasgupta was born in 1904 in Bengal (in a part of India that is now in Bangladesh). In 1925 he was initiated in the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, founded by Sri Caitanya in the fifteenth century, specifically into a sect (the Mahanam Sampradaya) that focused on the power of God’s name, ‘Hari, Krishna’, and at this point took his familiar name Mahanambrata Brahmachari (which might be translated, ‘the monk whose dedication is entirely to the "great name"’). (Source: Clooney, Francis X., S.J. "In Memoriam: Mahanambrata Brahmachari [25 December 1904–18 October 1999]". The Merton Annual, No. 13 [October 2000]: 123-126.)

Nancy Fly Bredenberg was a student attending Vassar College in New York. She asked Merton for some advice on a class paper she was writing.

Bishop Joseph Breitenbeck was serving as the Archdiocese of Detroit at the time of this correspondence.

Dr. Louis J. Broussard was a consulting psychologist from San Angelo, Texas at the time of writing.

Beatrice Bruteau was a friend of Daniel Walsh and had asked Walsh to invite Merton to Fordham University for a conference by the Cardinal Bea Institute of Spirituality (Merton could not go). She writes now to submit a play written by her friend, Helen De Sola, entitled "Pandora's Box". Bruteau received a doctorate in philosophy from Fordham University, where she was one of the founders of the Teilhard Research Institute, an interdisciplinary institute dedicated to the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. She has authored many books and articles on the study of philosophy, mathematics and religion, demonstrating the integration of the disciplines and the East-West dialogue in religion. (Source: Merton and Judaism. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae Press. 2003.)

Jacqueline Bull was Head of Special Collections at the University of Kentucky's Margaret I. King Library.

Shirley Burden was a photographer from Beverly Hills, California.

Ethel Burns was writing from New York and seemed to be familiar with some of Merton's Columbia University acquaintances, including Mark Van Doren, whom she mentions seeing on a TV interview in which he spoke of Merton.

T. F. Burns was a founding director of the Tablet publishing company. He worked for, and later became chairman of Burns and Oates publishing company. Both the publisher and the publication were produced for a Catholic audience. However, Burns was not afraid to take some controversial views, such as criticizing «Humanae Vitae» after the Second Vatican Council. He writes to Merton from London. (Source: "The History of the Tablet - a summary of '1840-1990 A Commemorative History, The Tablet' by Michael Walsh" from «The Tablet» website [http://www.thetablet.co.uk/history.shtml].)

Cynthia Bush was Publicity Director for New Directions Publishing Corporation in New York.

During the time of Merton's correspondence with Paul Tillich, Grace Calí Leonard was Tillich's secretary and editorial assistant at Harvard University. Now going by her maiden name of Calí in her later roles as journalist and freelance writer, her book entitled Paul Tillich, First Hand: A Memoir of the Harvard Years was published in 1996, which includes a chapter on Merton and Tillich.

Before the Second Vatican Council was over, Dom Helder Câmara moved from being auxiliary bishop of Rio de Janeiro to archbishop of Olinda and Recife, a very poor region in the northeast of Brazil. Dubbed the "red bishop" by «Time» magazine, he was hailed by some as champion of the poor and labeled as a communist radical by detractors. A famous quote of his is, "When I feed the poor they called me a saint", he once said. "When I asked, 'Why are they poor?' they called me a communist." (Sources: «The Hidden Ground of Love» and The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research [http://www.transnational.org/forum/power/1999/09redbishop.html].)

Charles Cameron was a 20-year-old student from Christ Church College in Oxford England. (Source: «The Road to Joy», p. 333.)

Fr. Joseph Canivera was a Trappist monk from the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Scourmont in Belgium.

Marie Cantlon was writing on behalf of Harper and Row, Publishers, from New York.

Fr. J. A. Caraman was writing from Umvukwes, Rhodesia (currently Mvurwi, Zimbabwe).

Arthur Graham Carey was the founder of «The Catholic Art Quarterly», later known as «Good Work».

Mother Peter of the Holy Face was a Carmelite nun and Prioress of the community in Louisville, Kentucky.

Fr. Robert B. Pfisterer was a Franciscan priest of the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

Paul-Pierre Cardinal Philippe was a Dominican priest who initially taught at the Pontificium Athenaeum Angelicum in Rome. In 1959, he became secretary of the Vatican's Congregation for Religious. In 1967, he became secretary of Doctrine of the Faith for the Roman Curia, and was elevated to cardinal in 1973. Philippe had been to Gethsemani and spoke to the community.

Gabriel Vahanian was one of the foremost theologians of the Death of God Movement that flourished in the 1960's. Later, he would write about technology and its effects on society and theology, including reflections on the thoughts of Jacques Ellul. Gabriel Vahanian writes to Merton while at his summer residence in Allauch, France. At that time, he was a professor at Syracuse University in New York.

Dom Alferio Caruana was a Maltese Benedictine monk living in Salerno, Italy, and trying to go to Malta. "Dom" is used here as a title of a professed monk and does not mean he was an abbot. Caruana's letter mentions he will be ordained to the priesthood in July of 1967.

George Casey was writing from St. Brigid's Church in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Alice Kathryn Casper lived in Louisville, Kentucky at the time of correspondence with Merton.

Guido Castillo writes from Montevideo, Uruguay.

Sr. Mectildes Vilaça Castro is writing from Brazil.