The book was part travelogue and part meditation on what inspires pilgrimages, what those who make them seek.
“This is a meditative, reflective book,” Merle Rubin wrote in a review for The Christian Science Monitor, “a careful blend of objectivity and subjectivity, written in an open-minded mind, subtly balanced between belief and disbelief.”
Eleanor Carroll Munro was born on March 28, 1928 in Brooklyn to Thomas and Lucile Nadler Munro. The family moved to the Cleveland area when her father became the curator of the Cleveland Museum, and she graduated from Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Smith College in 1949 and then studied for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1968 she received a master’s degree in English from Columbia University.
In the 1950s, she was an editor at Art News magazine (now ARTnews) and then editor-in-chief of Art News Annual. The editor of Art News at the time was Alfred M. Frankfurter. They married in 1960. He died in 1965.
In 1969 Mrs. Munro with EJ Kahn Jr., a writer for The New Yorker. He died in 1994.
In addition to her son, a professor of religion at Boston University, Mrs. Munro leaves behind two sisters, Cynthia Beeker and Elisabeth Smith; a brother, Donald; and two grandchildren. Another son from her first marriage, Alexander, died in 1993.
Other books by Mrs. Munro were “The Golden Encyclopedia of Art” (1961) and “Through the Vermilion Gates: A Journey Into China’s Past” (1971). She also compiled two reading books, “Wedding Readings: Centuries of Writing and Rituals for Love and Marriage” (1989) and “Readings for Remembrance: A Collection for Funerals and Memorial Services” (2000).
In a 1993 article for the Travel section of The Times, she offered a memorial of sorts of her own. She told a story from when she was working on the book on pilgrimages: She took her mother, who was then 86 and seemed to be fading, on one of her pilgrimages through France and Spain. The trip, she wrote, seemed to rekindle her mother’s interest in life, albeit short-lived.
