This is the little book that Franny clings to throughout her doomed date with Lane in the J.D. Salinger classic Franny and Zooey, which is likely how most people came to know about it after 1961. But this classic of Orthodox Christian spirituality is truly timeless: it's the account of the life of a pilgrim who wanders the vast Russian countryside sometime in the late nineteenth century, a pack on his back, reciting the Jesus prayer as he goes.