Who was Dorothy Day, and how did she arrive at the path she chose to follow?
Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn New York on November 9, 1897. Her father was a sports writer who moved his family to Oakland, California, where Dorothy witnessed the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Seeing how people helped each other in those tragic circumstances influenced Dorothy’s later life. Eventually, Dorothy’s father lost his job and the family moved to a tenement in Chicago; this period of her father’s unemployment led her to an understanding of the shame and loss of dignity that people feel when they have failed at or lost something valuable in their lives. Dorothy’s parents encouraged reading, and she was especially interested in books like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle that woke her social conscience. In 1914, Dorothy won a scholarship to the University of Illinois, but she dropped out of college after two years and moved to New York, where she became a writer for various socialist periodicals.
