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Zusatztext 41793310 Informationen zum Autor Edited by Robert Ellsberg Klappentext For almost fifty years, through her tireless service to the poor and her courageous witness for peace, Dorothy Day offered an example of the gospel in action. Now the publication of her diaries, previously sealed for twenty-five years after her death, offers a uniquely intimate portrait of her struggles and concerns. Beginning in 1934 and ending in 1980, these diaries reflect her response to the vast changes in America, the Church, and the wider world. Day experienced most of the great social movements of her time but, as these diaries reveal, even while she labored for a transformed world, she simultaneously remained grounded in everyday human life: the demands of her extended Catholic worker family; her struggles to be more patient and charitable; the discipline of prayer and worship that structured her days; her efforts to find God in all the tasks and encounters of daily life. A story of faithful striving for holiness and the radical transformation of the world, Day's life challenges readers to imagine what it would be like to live as if the gospels were true. INTRODUCTION In The Long Loneliness , Dorothy Day described her early habit of keeping a diary: “When I was a child, my sister and I kept notebooks; recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us, even while we wrote about it.” Though somewhat irregularly, she maintained this habit throughout her life. Sometimes her reflections were prompted by happiness, and sometimes by sorrow. But mostly her diary entries were an expression of her intense interest in life, her need to observe and take note of what was happening around her and to track her own responses. Unfortunately, the diaries from her early life were lost. Thus, we have no contemporary record of the years described in her memoirs or in an earlier (and much regretted) autobiographical novel. That part of her life included a mostly happy childhood in New York, Oakland, and Chicago; a brief college career; a return to New York in 1916, which put her in touch with many of the leading radical journalists and activists of the day; her arrest with suffragists in Washington and her friendship with an assorted lot of socialists, anarchists, and literary Bohemians; her association with the playwright Eugene O’Neill; an unhappy love affair; and what she later described as years of restless searching. She acknowledged, in her books, that there was much that she left out. As she later noted in her diary, “Aside from drug addiction, I committed all the sins young people commit today.” Though that story lies outside the scope of this volume, the memories and associations from her early years would continue to surface and shape the rest of her life. In her first memoir, From Union Square to Rome (1938), she quoted verbatim from a journal she kept while living on Staten Island in 1925 with her “common- law husband,” Forster Batterham. From that text, later revised in The Long Loneliness (1952), we get an immediate impression of the peace and happiness that preceded her conversion to Catholicism. I have been passing through some years of fret and strife, beauty and ugliness, days and even weeks of sadness and despair, but seldom has there been the quiet beauty and happiness I have now. I thought all those years I had freedom, but now I feel that I had neither real freedom nor even a sense of freedom. She wrote particularly about her experience of pregnancy and the feelings of gratitude she felt—a gratitude so large that only God could receive it. But that happiness was not to endure. Her decision to have her daughter Tamar baptized in the Catholic Church, followed by her own conversion in 1927, inv...
