Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IN HER MOST DISCOURAGED MOMENTS, Dorothy could always point to The Catholic Worker as the unerring example of what she was doing right. In the history of American journalism, secular and religious, it is a unique publication. By 1950, she had in place the best staff she ever had, making use of resident talent and of writers based elsewhere around the country. Under Bob Ludlow, the paper had acquired a new gravity and depth, Irene Naughton was constantly honing her investigative reporting skills, and in his monthly columns about life on Mott Street, Tom Sullivan brought the house of hospitality to life in all its quotidian joy and grotesquerie.
In 1946, Dorothy had changed the name of her column from the prosaic "Day by Day" to the more spirited "On Pilgrimage," and at the end of 1949 the Worker had brought out that year's columns in book form in a limited edition. That same year the woodcuts of the masterful graphic artist Fritz Eichenberg first appeared, replacing Ade Bethune's work as the visual signature of the paper. Though some of his later representational drawings bordered on the saccharine, many of his freshest images-Christ on a breadline, Christ with other vagrants before the bar of justice-were as forceful as the best of Bethune's.