The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-Tsix, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders--the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom," Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has led a peripetatic childhood in kinship care, foster care and boarding school.