The Monk - The Artist - The Aunt - The Essayist - The Woman - The Jesuit - The Mother - Self-Portrait
Berrigan's Portraits is his first completely biographical work, and it is perhaps his most intimate book. Here he speaks candidly of some of the people he has known and admired, people of fame and people who will probably never be memorialized or even remembered outside these pages.
Here are Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin--guides to the vision that has inspired Berrigan's own witness to Christian peace. Here is an unknown woman painter, dying of cancer but gifted with uncanny powers of insight. Here are members of Berrigan's own family: a tough-minded aunt, who found in the currently outmoded pieties of the past a remedy for the terrible day-in-and-day-out of the religious life; his own mother, providential, foreseeing, compassionate. Lastly there is a self-portrait--not in a convex mirror, not a picture at an exhibition--of what has been the meaning of these various people and of their influence on him and his work.