Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion

Harvard psychiatrist Coles, Pulitzer Prize winner for Children of Crisis, here presents Dorothy Day, whom he acknowledges as spiritual mentor. Coles first met Day, who died in 1980, 35 years ago when, as a medical student, he did volunteer work at the soup kitchen of her famed ""house of hospitality'' on New York's lower East Side. From taped conversations with Day over a two-year period in the '70s, Coles examines the strands of the personal vision of this unusual woman. There are reminiscences of her early bohemian rounds in Greenwich Village with Eugene O'Neill, Mike Gold, Kenneth Burke and others who, like her, were aspiring writers. Before the spiritual epiphany that drew her to Catholicism she suffered sexual conflict and was an unwed mother. A meeting with Peter Maurin, a French spiritual revolutionary, led to the founding of her newspaper the Catholic Worker, still in circulation. Day's compelling point of view is expressed in story format in an unconventional biography that is appropriate for the sensual woman many consider a saint. (June 25)