Status
Available
Call number
Publication
HarperOne (2009), 304 pages
Description
The compelling autobiography of a remarkable Catholic woman, sainted by many, who championed the rights of the poor in America's inner cities. 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 Catholicism that meant the end of a Bohemian lifestyle and common-law marriage. The Long Loneliness chronilces 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 cuase of the poor and the outcast, she became an inspiration to such activists as Thomas Merton, Michael Harrinton, Daniel Berrigan, Ceasr Chavez, and countless others. This edition of The Long Loneliness begins with an eloquent introduction by Robert Coles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and longtime friend, admirer, and biographer of Dorothy Day.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Ganeshaka
My local library has a small cart of discarded and donated books. The items on it are a very mixed bag, and purchaseable at garage sale prices - $1.00 hardcover, $.50 paperback. It's a great little petty cash raising gimmick, and I invariably leave, after my weekly visit, with one or two books, of
Thus I found myself perusing The Long Loneliness - the autobiography of Dorothy Day, an American journalist, social activist, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker. As an ex-altarboy, and secular humanist, I tend to hiss and emit clouds of steam, like a vampire sprinkled with holy water, when approaching literature concerning my former church. Why? Well for starters, too many childhood hours lost on catechism class, and Sunday Mass, when I could have been playing softball or fishing.
But I was hooked by Day's first person narration from page one - she begins in the interior of a confessional booth. She clearly had a journalist's hooks. And she didn't, like me, start out a Catholic. Day was the child of a newspaper man, and traveled the country. She experienced the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She was nine. Her family, struggling financially, then moved to Chicago, where she won a scholarship for her proficiency in Greek and Latin. As a young adult, she ultimately settled in New York City. Day was a voracious reader, a bit of a mystic, and preoccupied from an early age with social justice. Writers like Dostoyevsky, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and activists like Eugene Debs and the I.W.W. formed her world view.
In New York City, in 1917, when she was 20 years old, she began her own career as a journalist and activist, writing for The Call, and later, The Masses. One of the highlights of her story is her description of these years of political ferment from her perspective at the intersection of a movement that was part Socialist, part I.W.W., part anarchist, and part liberal.
Then came her Bohemian years during which she bore a child in a common-law marriage. The community she experienced during that time led to an epiphany that life without an engaged social community was like a long loneliness. This lead to her eventual conversion to Catholicism. It was not an easy choice because her common law partner was an atheist, and they could not marry or cohabit after her conversion.
Then began Day's lifelong association with Peter Maurin, and the founding of the organization known as the Catholic Worker. Together, they developed a journal with a wide circulation, helped fund a network of hospices, and supported the activities of a number of labor organizations. Their policies, such as opposition to Generalissimo Franco, did not always square with the Catholic Church. The highlight of this portion of her story is her detailed description of the communal living of the journal's staff. Abbie Hoffman once praised Day as "the first hippie". As one who recalls those days and that shared lifestyle, I have to agree that I got the same sense of deja vu while reading of the characters who drifted through the Catholic Workers offices and living quarters.
Day died in 1980. A movie has been made of her life, starring Moira Kelly and Martin Sheen. She has been proposed for sainthood, and deemed a "Servant of God" by Pope John Paul II (the first of four stages in an investigation of sainthood.) Whether or not she attains that honor, her life was fascinating and inspiring. In the tumult of The Great Depression, she made lemonade out of lemon rinds. Her example was a reminder that poverty can be a great virtue and a source of spiritual growth and community. In the times we live in now, and may face in the future, that alone is a reason to read her autobiography.
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a genre or author I might never otherwise have encountered.Thus I found myself perusing The Long Loneliness - the autobiography of Dorothy Day, an American journalist, social activist, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker. As an ex-altarboy, and secular humanist, I tend to hiss and emit clouds of steam, like a vampire sprinkled with holy water, when approaching literature concerning my former church. Why? Well for starters, too many childhood hours lost on catechism class, and Sunday Mass, when I could have been playing softball or fishing.
But I was hooked by Day's first person narration from page one - she begins in the interior of a confessional booth. She clearly had a journalist's hooks. And she didn't, like me, start out a Catholic. Day was the child of a newspaper man, and traveled the country. She experienced the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She was nine. Her family, struggling financially, then moved to Chicago, where she won a scholarship for her proficiency in Greek and Latin. As a young adult, she ultimately settled in New York City. Day was a voracious reader, a bit of a mystic, and preoccupied from an early age with social justice. Writers like Dostoyevsky, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and activists like Eugene Debs and the I.W.W. formed her world view.
In New York City, in 1917, when she was 20 years old, she began her own career as a journalist and activist, writing for The Call, and later, The Masses. One of the highlights of her story is her description of these years of political ferment from her perspective at the intersection of a movement that was part Socialist, part I.W.W., part anarchist, and part liberal.
Then came her Bohemian years during which she bore a child in a common-law marriage. The community she experienced during that time led to an epiphany that life without an engaged social community was like a long loneliness. This lead to her eventual conversion to Catholicism. It was not an easy choice because her common law partner was an atheist, and they could not marry or cohabit after her conversion.
Then began Day's lifelong association with Peter Maurin, and the founding of the organization known as the Catholic Worker. Together, they developed a journal with a wide circulation, helped fund a network of hospices, and supported the activities of a number of labor organizations. Their policies, such as opposition to Generalissimo Franco, did not always square with the Catholic Church. The highlight of this portion of her story is her detailed description of the communal living of the journal's staff. Abbie Hoffman once praised Day as "the first hippie". As one who recalls those days and that shared lifestyle, I have to agree that I got the same sense of deja vu while reading of the characters who drifted through the Catholic Workers offices and living quarters.
Day died in 1980. A movie has been made of her life, starring Moira Kelly and Martin Sheen. She has been proposed for sainthood, and deemed a "Servant of God" by Pope John Paul II (the first of four stages in an investigation of sainthood.) Whether or not she attains that honor, her life was fascinating and inspiring. In the tumult of The Great Depression, she made lemonade out of lemon rinds. Her example was a reminder that poverty can be a great virtue and a source of spiritual growth and community. In the times we live in now, and may face in the future, that alone is a reason to read her autobiography.
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LibraryThing member ctpress
Catholic social activist Dorothy Day's autobiography is a fascinating story. I mostly enjoyed Dorothy Days formative years where she as a radical bohemian decided to move into poor areas of New York and there became aware of the downtrodden and disenfranchised masses and her struggle to speak up
I lost all consciousness of any cause. I had no sense of being a radical, making protest against a government, carrying on a nonviolent revolution. I could only feel darkness and desolation all around me. The bar of gold which the sun left on the ceiling every morning for a short hour taunted me….a heartbreaking conviction of the ugliness, the futility of life came over me so that I could not weep but only lie there in blank misery. I lost all feeling of my own identity. I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin.
It's also a somewhat frustrating read because so many "facts" are missing - at least for me - in the union struggle in USA. A lot of names and events are mentioned with little explanation. That part of her story was difficult to figure out.
But I liked the strong sense of community. So often she felt alone also in the marriage that eventually ended in divorce.
The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community. The living together, working together, sharing together, loving God and loving our brother, and living close to him in community so we can show our love for Him.
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for them as a journalist and writer and activist - and later her conversion into catholicism. Her account of her time in prison and the hunger strike is both heartbreaking and profound. I lost all consciousness of any cause. I had no sense of being a radical, making protest against a government, carrying on a nonviolent revolution. I could only feel darkness and desolation all around me. The bar of gold which the sun left on the ceiling every morning for a short hour taunted me….a heartbreaking conviction of the ugliness, the futility of life came over me so that I could not weep but only lie there in blank misery. I lost all feeling of my own identity. I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin.
It's also a somewhat frustrating read because so many "facts" are missing - at least for me - in the union struggle in USA. A lot of names and events are mentioned with little explanation. That part of her story was difficult to figure out.
But I liked the strong sense of community. So often she felt alone also in the marriage that eventually ended in divorce.
The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community. The living together, working together, sharing together, loving God and loving our brother, and living close to him in community so we can show our love for Him.
Show Less
LibraryThing member pjsullivan
This book reads like an autobiography, but is actually about the author's spiritual conversion to the Catholic church. A very significant conversion it was because it resulted in the Catholic Worker movement. Dorothy Day became so dedicated to the church that she transcended it, into the realm of
As a child, she was not religious, except for a few formal prayers. "We did not search for God when we were children." At university, she saw religion as "an opiate of the people and not a very attractive one." But by page 132 she writes, "I was surprised that I found myself beginning to pray daily." Then, "I began to go to Mass regularly on Sunday mornings." This book is about her gradual transformation from unchurched Bohemian to candidate for sainthood, how it happened and what she thought about it.
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true Christianity. Aware that her church was not doing all that it should in following Christ, it was inevitable that she would form a splinter group, without breaking from that church, to practice authentic Christianity. As she was the mother of a child, it would have to be a lay group. Her meeting with Peter Maurin provided the catalyst, and the rest is history. She had found her life's work, and became one of the most influential Catholics of the twentieth century. As a child, she was not religious, except for a few formal prayers. "We did not search for God when we were children." At university, she saw religion as "an opiate of the people and not a very attractive one." But by page 132 she writes, "I was surprised that I found myself beginning to pray daily." Then, "I began to go to Mass regularly on Sunday mornings." This book is about her gradual transformation from unchurched Bohemian to candidate for sainthood, how it happened and what she thought about it.
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LibraryThing member Othemts
nother autobiography by an American Catholic convert who is remembered as one of the great leaders of social justice of the Twentieth Century. Unlike Merton, Day did not head to the cloister but to the streets and the farms meeting poverty and injustice head on. I'm impressed by her devotion and
Favorite Passages
Going to confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are "giving yourself away." But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the long run all man's problems are the same, his sustenance and love.
People have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us. Even those most loved show their frailty and their weaknesses and no matter how we may will to see only the best in others, their strength rather than their weakness, we are all too conscious of our own failings and recognize them in others.
The Catholic Worker, as the name implied, was directed to the worker, but we used the word in its broadest sense, meaning those who worked with hand or brain, those who did physical, mental or spiritual work. But we thought primarily of the poor, the dispossed, the exploited.
Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities -- all these things marked us as privileged in a way. We felt a respect for the poor and destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for His compassion (p. 204).
What a delightful thing it is to be boldly profligate, to ignore the price of coffee and go on serving the long line of destitute men who come to us, good coffee and the finest of bread.
"Nothing is too good for the pour," our editor Tom Sullivan says, and he likes that aphorism especially when he is helping himself to something extra good (p. 235).
Once a priest said to us that no gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was that truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but in part, through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.
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the way in which she incorporates her faith into a lifestyle. And she writes with both humility and humor. It's hard not to want to change my life after reading this book. I also think now that I may be an anarcho-syndicalists and never knew it.Favorite Passages
Going to confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are "giving yourself away." But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the long run all man's problems are the same, his sustenance and love.
People have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us. Even those most loved show their frailty and their weaknesses and no matter how we may will to see only the best in others, their strength rather than their weakness, we are all too conscious of our own failings and recognize them in others.
The Catholic Worker, as the name implied, was directed to the worker, but we used the word in its broadest sense, meaning those who worked with hand or brain, those who did physical, mental or spiritual work. But we thought primarily of the poor, the dispossed, the exploited.
Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities -- all these things marked us as privileged in a way. We felt a respect for the poor and destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for His compassion (p. 204).
What a delightful thing it is to be boldly profligate, to ignore the price of coffee and go on serving the long line of destitute men who come to us, good coffee and the finest of bread.
"Nothing is too good for the pour," our editor Tom Sullivan says, and he likes that aphorism especially when he is helping himself to something extra good (p. 235).
Once a priest said to us that no gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was that truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but in part, through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.
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LibraryThing member devandecicco
A fascinating view into the life of an amazing woman.
LibraryThing member fulner
Wow! I have heard of Dorthy Day for years. The famous Catholic Anarchists. Being a radical myself I have been drawn to the idea for some time. In her autobiography I learn that she was much more complicated that I had originally thought.
I see so much of myself, and my wife, in her journey. My love
She never meant to write about herself, and the autobiography only left me wanting more. How to live in peace with neighbors above all. How to love Christ with a heart, even when it seems like His world is not for us. Anarchy doesn't have to be about politics. Its...different. I long for more. I am certain her canonization process will be long and drawn out, and the body of Christ will have to grow before we can call her St. Dorthy Day.
I see so much of myself, and my wife, in her journey. My love
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of God no matter what, and no way to understand how one could ever live without him. My wife's content skeptism of the world and weariness of those outside of our immediate circle. An undying love for a child no matter how frustrating. A conversion story that occurs just as her loved one is strengthening resistance to religion. She never meant to write about herself, and the autobiography only left me wanting more. How to live in peace with neighbors above all. How to love Christ with a heart, even when it seems like His world is not for us. Anarchy doesn't have to be about politics. Its...different. I long for more. I am certain her canonization process will be long and drawn out, and the body of Christ will have to grow before we can call her St. Dorthy Day.
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LibraryThing member CountryCache
Referenced on page 33 in PRACTICING THEOLOGY. This is the beginning of Chapter 2: "Attending to the Gaps Between Beliefs and Practices," by Amy Plantinga Pauw.
LibraryThing member EliseP
Dorothy Day was a social activist who began her work with the poor and outcast around 1915. Eventually she converted to Roman Catholicism, rejecting Communism. Not the best writing here -- it rambles occasionally -- and she talks a lot about "the mass" and "the proletariat", etc. With help from
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friend Peter Maurin, she started the Catholic Worker newspaper, which helped Catholics see their role as notthat of sitting in pews, but acting as Christ would on behalf the poor and outcast. "I have not done well," she said, "but I have don what I could." How many of us can say the same? Show Less
LibraryThing member devandecicco
A fascinating view into the life of an amazing woman.
LibraryThing member nmele
Just read it! This is a classic book that illuminates Catholic social teaching and the need to compassionately reach out to everyone, yes everyone, while offering much food for meditation and contemplation. Deeply spiritual, deeply moving, and deeply personal.
LibraryThing member stillatim
I have no idea how historically accurate Day's memoir is, but I find it hard to imagine anyone I admire more than the woman who appears in these pages.
Original language
English
Original publication date
1952
Physical description
304 p.; 5.19 inches
ISBN
0060617519 / 9780060617516