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  1968-07-11: Letter from Thomas Merton to August Schou, Secretary of the Nobel Prize Committee, recommending Vinoba Bhave for the Nobel Peace Prize

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  1965-03-09: Letter from Thomas Merton to Robert D. Crane (with handwritten annotations by Crane)

  Robert D. Crane was a Research Associate with the Center for Strategic Studies and was later with the Hudson Institute for National Security and International Order in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. He was involved in Republican Party functions and conservative-leaning think-tanks on national and international security and outer space security. He was a chief advisor to Richard Nixon from 1962-1967. In 1980, he converted to Islam and took the name Farooq Abdul Haq.
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  1962-08-09: Letter from Thomas Merton to Shinzo Hamai, Mayor of Hiroshima, Japan

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  1967-09-18 (#02): Attachment to letter to Thomas Merton from "De Roo, Remi Joseph, Bishop, 1924-2022," (recommendation to the Second Vatican Council to make changes to canon law to officially recognize hermits in monastic and religious life)

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  1967-09-18 (#01): Letter to Thomas Merton from "De Roo, Remi Joseph, Bishop, 1924-2022"

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  1968-02-22: Letter from Thomas Merton to Nancy Fly Bredenberg

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  1967-01-23 - letter from an unidentified sender to Thomas Merton, postmarked Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 23 January 1967

  An unknown sender writes to Merton, "I'm glad you exist".
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  1962-07-09: Postcard to Merton from "Zahn, Gordon Charles, 1918-2007." Photograph of Sankt Radegund cemetery in Austria with grave of Franz Jägerstätter circled in pen by Gordon Zahn sent to Thomas Merton, 1962 July 9.

  Thomas Merton asked Gordon Zahn if he had a photograph of the grave of Franz Jägerstätter. Zahn sent Merton a photograph with the grave marked in pen. Blessed Franz Jägerstätter was an Austrian, Catholic lay person, and conscientious objector during the Second World War. The Nazi regime denied him an alternative to armed combat. He was imprisoned and executed in 1943.
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  1964-10-12: Letter from Thomas Merton to Chris McNair

  Thomas Merton writes his condolences and sends his poem "Picture of a Black Child with a White Doll" to the father of Carol Denise McNair, one of the girls killed in the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Merton references, in the letter and his poem, the photographs by Chris McNair of his daughter published in LOOK magazine, March 24, 1964, pages 23-25.
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  1942-12-01: Letter from John Paul Merton (Thomas Merton's younger brother) to his uncle, Walter Jenkins

  John Paul Merton writes to his uncle while serving in England in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. He speaks of his upcoming marriage in Birkenhead to Margaret Evans.John Paul Merton was Thomas Merton's younger, and only, sibling. The boys spent much time apart, Thomas traveling with his father Owen, the painter, in France and England, where he was schooled. John Paul lived with his maternal grandparents, the Jenkins, and went to schools in New York and later military academy, graduating in the last class in 1935 from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania's academy. He attended Cornell and was there first interested in Catholicism, taking up flying with the Catholic chaplain, Fr. Donald Cleary. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in 1941, intending to get involved in the Second World War and the United States was not yet committed. He went by the nickname "Mert". One of the correspondents in the letters in the Merton Collection, Thomas O'Brien, gave his flight training. John Paul visited Thomas Merton at Gethsemani during a leave in July of 1942. He expressed interest in becoming baptized Catholic and received expedited instructions from Thomas and Dom James Fox because he had only a week's leave. He was baptized July 26, 1942. In August 1942, John Paul was sent into action in England. While on leave in England, he met Margaret May Evans and married her in February of 1943. On April 16, 1943, he embarked in a Wellington bomber over the English Channel. For unknown reasons, the plane lost altitude and crashed. John Paul's back was broken, but he was taken aboard a dinghy with some survivors. He died the 17th, which was the Saturday of Passion Week. The others were rescued Holy Thursday, and Thomas Merton learned of his brother's death on Easter Tuesday. Thomas Merton responded with the poem, "For My Brother Reported Missing in Action, 1943", which concludes the The Seven Storey Mountain. (Source: The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, pp. 294-295.)