The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day

A compelling autobiographical testament to the spiritual pilgrimage of a woman who, in her own words, dedicated herself "to bring[ing] about the kind of society where it is easier to be good.''

 

When Dorothy Day died in 1980, the New York Times eulogized her as "a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality... founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and leader for more than fifty years in numerous battles of social justice." Here, in her own words, this remarkable woman tells of her early life as a young journalist in the crucible of Greenwich Village political and literary thought in the 1920s, and of her momentous conversion to Catholocism that meant the end of a Bohemian lifestyle and common-law marriage. 

 

The Long Loneliness chronicles Dorothy Day's lifelong association with Peter Maurin and the genesis of the Catholic Worker Movement. Unstinting in her commitment to peace, nonviolence, racial justice, and the cause of the poor and the outcast, she became an inspiration to such activists as Thomas Merton, Michael Harrington, Daniel Berrigan, Cesar Chavez, and countless others.