Analysis of Dorothy Day's writing methods in her autobiography "The Long Loneliness"

Analysis of "The Long Loneliness"

Not that The Long Loneliness is the most trustworthy or illuminating cause onto Day or the Catholic Worker movement. Day omits a number of specially unpleasant or unflattering incidents from her radical days within Greenwich Village: her abortion (fictionally camouflaged within a morning fresh, The Eleventh Virgin) and her drinking bouts with fellow bohemians. (In Exile's Return, Malcolm Cowley recounted how Day once literally drank Eugene O'Neill below the table.)

While she's bravely unapologetic approximately her radical politics, she does compose elliptically approximately her dissent towards American entry into World War II--a concession, sensible but still dishonest, towards America's postwar euphoria. She else's literature are many informative approximately different criterions of her vocation. Loaves and Fishes (1962), for example, consist many vivid vignettes of the New York "house of hospitality." On Pilgrimage: The Sixties (1973) chronicles her reactions towards the civil rights motion, the Vietnam War, the New Left, and the upheavals within American Catholicism. And Robert Ellsberg's splendid bundle of Day's articles, essays, and editorials, By Little and By Little (1983) displays the range of her interests.

Still, The Long Loneliness remains invaluable as a witness towards modernity, a remarkably candid fund, without piety, of her ride towards faith. Day is sincere and charitable (almost towards a fault) approximately her loosely worn counseling via men. Consider the list: her relatively indifferent husband (who, she neglects towards tell ourselves, tried towards quash her budding career as a journalist); the bohemian lefties whom slept with and discarded her; the mercurial Forster Batterham, a man via curves attentive lover ("Forster made the physical earth arrive existence for me," she words within a gentle erotic euphemism) and self-absorbed crank (he spends two weeks brooding onto the executions of Sacco and ...