Which of Ms. Day's books is the best to start with?
I've recently gained a real interest in Dorothy Day after reading about her. Which of the the books she wrote is the best introduction to her?
shareAll of the books of hers that I've read are really accessible and well written. I think "The Long Loneliness" might be the best to begin with, as it is a biography that includes her childhood and youth, and describes how she came to become involved in the Catholic Worker.
After that, maybe "Loaves and Fishes", which treats life in the Catholic Worker movement in greater detail, and deals with the later parts of her life in greater detail.
There is a biography of Peter Maurin availible that is mostly composed of her writings, organized by another biographer, that is a really excellent book. Other than that, I know she wrote another account of her conversion to Catholicism in "From Union Square to Rome", and has a book of religious reflections in "On Pilgrimage", but I haven't read these in entirety.
There is also a biography of her by Jim Forrest called "Love is the Measure" - very simply written, but a lot of good factual information about her life, including things she may have passed over in her own writing. I think Thomas Merton also wrote an essay on her and the Catholic Worker.
Hopefully you live near a library that carries her work - fortunately for me, I live near a Catholic college which carries most everything written about her.
There is an excellent book that is actually a 4-in-1 biography, including Day, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and Thomas Merton, 4 mid-20th century Catholic American writers. The book is The Life You Save May Be Your Own (title taken from O'Connor story), and the author is Paul Elie. It's really a remarkable work, written by an editor at Farrar, Stras & Giroux, where several other editors sympathetic to the 4 writers worked. They all knew and wrote to and of one another, but the work transcends all of that while providing solid insights into each of them. It's beautiful, really, and nears the depths of literary beauty that each of them were to find in their individual writings.
The NPR series Speaking of Faith had a great hour on the author and his work, archived at http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/faithfiredbylit/transcript.shtml. That's where I first heard of the book. I highly recommend it, along with the writings of all 4 subjects.