married in a church, but they never took
their children to worship. Even so, Dor-
othy, their middle daughter, was a pious
child who read Scripture as ravenously
as novels and watched with interest as
her friends and their families prayed. At
twelve, she demanded to be baptized at
a nearby Episcopal church; in high school,
she learned Greek and practiced her
translation skills on the New Testament.
She tested her way into a scholarship at
the University of Illinois, where she ma-
triculated not long after the socialist Eu-
gene Debs got nearly a million votes in
the 1912 Presidential election. Like many
other students, she was drawn to the col-
lege Socialist Club, which is where she
heard a lecture by Rose Pastor Stokes, a
feminist who went on to help found the
Communist Party of America.
Politics change like the weather, and
this era of falling atmospheric pressure
is nicely captured in “Dorothy Day: Dis-
senting Voice of the American Century,”
a new biography co-written by John
Loughery and Blythe Randolph. It was
the great age of “isms,” especially on
American campuses, and at first Day
enthusiastically embraced them. Her
family had always been financially mar-
ginal, and that left her receptive to all
politics that prioritized the poor; at the
same time, a rising atheism and anti-
authoritarianism left her eager to cast off
her religious faith, which her comrades
regarded as risible. She joined a literary
club called the Scribblers and submit-
ted work to a magazine and a newspa-
per on campus, along with the local paper
in Urbana–Champaign. Her writing was
more impressive than her grades, which
included an F in biology, so, when her
family moved back to New York, Day
dropped out and went with them.
Day’s father had helped her brothers
find journalism jobs, but he refused to
help her, so she was left to knock on the
doors of papers around the city. When
that failed, she remembered the alter-
native media and leftist publications she
had learned about on campus, and found
a job with the Call, a socialist daily in
which her first byline appeared under
the headline “Girl Reporter, with Three
Cents in Her Purse, Braves Night Court.”
A few weeks later, she interviewed
Leon Trotsky, who was then living in
the Bronx. After that, she managed to
craft a feature from a three-minute con-
versation with Margaret Sanger’s sister,
newly released from prison and desper-
ate to drum up support for the Ameri-
can Birth Control League.
In between writing for every radical
outlet in town, Day palled around with
Marxists, got arrested for picketing theWhite House with the suffragists, and
took a billy club in the ribs at an anti-
war riot. “Bohemian” doesn’t begin to
describe Day’s life in this period. Her
drinking was legendary, even by Green-
wich Village standards; the literary critic
Malcolm Cowley claimed, in his mem-
oir, that Day could hold her liquor bet-
ter than most gangsters. Some of that
drinking took place during Prohibition,
and was thus illegal, and much of it took
place at a bar alternately known as the
Hell Hole and the Bucket o’ Blood. Day’s
friends were all writing books or appear-
ing in them, and she was said to be the
model for characters in “The Malefac-
tors,” by her onetime roommate the nov-
elist Caroline Gordon, and in “A Moon
for the Misbegotten,” by her onetime
lover the playwright Eugene O’Neill.
Day herself wrote a book during this
time: an autobiographical novel called
“The Eleventh Virgin,” published in- It told the story of a disastrous
affair she’d had with an older writer,
which ended after she attempted sui-
cide and had an illegal abortion, a pro-
cedure performed by an ex-boyfriend
of the anarchist Emma Goldman. Day
wrote the novel while honeymooning
in Europe with a different man. The re-
bound ended no better than the previ-
ous relationship: one morning, Day took
off her wedding ring, left it on the bu-
reau, and walked out of the marriage.
She moved back to Chicago, where
she took jobs in a department store, at a
library, in a restaurant, and as an artist’s
model. Her employment was erratic, but
her politics were consistent. When the
Chicago police raided the Industrial
Workers of the World boarding house,
Day was there, and got arrested for pros-
titution—only because the police couldn’t
arrest people for socialism. She was re-
leased from jail a week later, and even-
tually made her way back to New York.
There Day fell in love with a man
named Forster Batterham. After the
abortion, she assumed that she could
not have children, and so was aston-
ished when she became pregnant, then
awed by the birth of a daughter, Tamar
Teresa, in 1926. Without consulting Bat-
terham, an atheist, she stopped a nun
on the street and asked to have the baby
baptized. Plenty of new parents are in-
spired to return to religion, and Day
would later write of how God had long
“I can’t wait to get home, run around outside,
and finally eat some fresh food.” PREVIOUS PAGE: BOB FITCH PHOTOGRAPHY ARCHIVE / DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS / STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES