An 'Intimate Portrait' Of Dorothy Day, The Catholic Activist With A Bohemian Past
Kate Hennessy drew from family letters, diaries and memories in writing Dorothy Day, a biography of her late grandmother. Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement and is now a candidate for sainthood.
March 23, 20171:53 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. If I were to tell you we're going to talk about one of the most important American Catholic leaders of the 20th century, you might not picture a woman whose early years included a Bohemian lifestyle in New York, an abortion and a child born out of wedlock. But Dorothy Day's story is anything but predictable.
She co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist faith-based movement for social change that still exists today. They led the Catholic Worker Movement from its beginnings in the Great Depression through the Vietnam War era. Day fed thousands of people, wrote newspaper columns, novels and plays, was arrested several times in protests, chain smoked for years, at a time lived on farms as part of an agrarian Back-to-the-Land strand of the Catholic Worker Movement.
She died in 1980 and is now a candidate for sainthood in the church. A new biography that illuminates Day's activism and her complex personal life comes from someone who knows both well. Writer Kate Hennessy is Day's youngest granddaughter, and she relied on family letters and diaries, interviews and her own memories for her new book "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty."
Well, Kate Hennessy, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's talk about Dorothy's teenage and early adult years. I mean, she had some amazingly rich experiences, but it was decidedly not a life of piety. Give us a sense of the kinds of people that she associated with, what she did.
http://www.npr.org/2017/03/23/521220274/an-intimate-portrait-of-dorothy-day-the-catholic-activist-with-a-bohemian-past
30:45 audio at link.
Dorothy Day
The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother
by Kate Hennessy
Hardcover
Scribner | 384 pages | ISBN 9781501133961 | January 2017