Robert Ellsberg, a former managing editor of the CW and editor of Dorothy Day’s writings, will describe her New York journey. Dorothy Day, champion of the oppressed, witness for peace, was born in Brooklyn and spent most of her life in New York’s Lower East Side. In the 1920s, while working as a journalist for progressive papers, she became close to Eugene O'Neill and others in the Greenwich Village scene. After her conversion to Catholicism, she founded the Catholic Worker newspaper and the first of her “houses of hospitality,” combining service to the poor and work for justice. The founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day established her first “houses of hospitality” in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1933, living with the poor, practicing the “works of mercy,” and struggling for peace and justice. Greenwich Village played an important part in her early life, when she was close to Eugene O’Neill and immersed herself in the literary/activist/bohemian scene. Later, as a Catholic, she modeled a version of radical Christianity, was arrested repeatedly for acts of civil disobedience during the civil defense drills of the 1950s, and spent time in the Women’s House of Detention on Sixth Avenue.
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