The Long Loneliness; The Autobiography of Dorothy Day
New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1952. First edition. Octavo, original gray cloth boards, black spine lettered in white, uncut, original pictorial dust jacket. Slight tanning to blank endpapers, faint toning and mild wear to corners and spine ends of unclipped jacket. A nearly-fine copy. Item #1822
"I DID NOT KNOW IN WHAT I BELIEVED, THOUGH I TRIED TO SERVE A CAUSE"
First edition of The Long Loneliness—the Autobiography of Dorothy Day—the most notable American lay Catholic of the twentieth century. Complete as published with the original pictorial dust jacket, illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg, along with Berenice Abbot's striking photographic portrait of Dorothy on the back panel. An exceptional copy, increasingly hard to find with the original dust jacket in such excellent condition.
Derived from a passage by the (now Venerable) English nun, Mary Ward, reprinted on the half-title, the opening passage of The Long Loneliness immerses the reader in a very specific time and place—a Catholic Church in a mid-century New York City summer: "When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with the smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night there is the sound of a great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasize the stillness. There is another sound too, besides that of the quiet movements of the people from pew to confession to altar-rail; there is the sliding of the shutters of the little window between you and the priest in his 'box.'"
The book is composed of five sections: Confession, Part One. Searching, Part Two. Natural Happiness, Part Three. Love is the Measure, Postscript. Day divides her life into two parts. Her first twenty-five years were times of great insecurity and turbulence, and it seems that the birth (and baptism) of her daughter Tamar Teresa in 1926—and her own conversion to Catholicism in 1927—did little to affect this struggle. Dorothy "suffered from the sense that her conversion represented a betrayal of the cause of the poor. The church, though in many ways the home of the poor, seemed otherwise to identify with the status quo. So she spent some lonely years in the wilderness, raising her child alone, while praying for some way of reconciling her faith and her commitment to social justice" (Robert Ellsberg).
Dorothy's pivotal meeting with Peter Maurin, and their founding of The Catholic Worker in 1933, finally alleviated her craving for a sense of purpose and community to accompany her faith. "The community to which she now belonged was united in work, in poverty, in resistance to what they called Holy Mother the State. They were united, too, she was confident, by religious faith, which joined friends and strangers, neighbors and distant correspondents, the living and the dead, and bound them all together" (Paul Elie).
Copyright page with Harper & Brothers code "M-A" (indicating a publication date of December 1951). Menendez, The Road to Rome, 492. Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. Elie, The Life You Save May by Your Own: An American Pilgrimage.
Price: $850.00