High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Seven Storey Mountain is the 1948 autobiography of Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk and a noted author of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Merton finished the book in 1946 at the age of 31, five years after entering the Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky. The title refers to the mountain of Purgatory in Dante`s Divine Comedy.