Vyrai Klystkeliuose
Introduction
Vyrai Klystkeliuose (Men on Wayward Paths) is a 1962 Lithuanian-language devotional anthology compiled by Dr. Juozas Prunskis and published in Chicago by Lietuviškos Knygos Klubas. The book presents biographical narratives of men from diverse backgrounds—scientists, journalists, military officers, artists, Communist editors, and Protestant clergy—who found their way to Catholic Christianity. It is a companion volume to Prunskis's earlier 28 Moterys (1959), extending his project of providing Lithuanian diaspora readers with intimate biographical and spiritual testimony in their native language.
Community and publication context
Community and publication setting
Context and significance
Significance
The volume's prior life in a Detroit Lithuanian community lending library, attested by the L.B. Detroito Apylinkės stamp and circulation card, documents the networks through which such books reached readers across the Midwest Lithuanian diaspora. The author's appended bibliography of roughly 30 works spanning 1931 to 1961—ranging from anti-Communist polemics to Marian devotion to comparative ecclesiastical law—makes this copy a useful bibliographic source for Prunskis's full output and for mapping the thematic concerns of Lithuanian Catholic exile publishing across three decades.
How this record carried memory
Lithuanian-language Catholic book publishing in the North American diaspora; Lietuviškos Knygos Klubas (Lithuanian Book Club) distributed devotional and cultural literature to Lithuanian exile and immigrant communities. Use of the Draugas press infrastructure sustained Lithuanian-language print culture outside Soviet-occupied Lithuania.
Record connections
People, places, and institutions linked in the catalog