“Told in Context.”: Dorothy Day's Previously Unpublished Reminiscence of Eugene O'Neill

Abstract

Abstract Catholic Worker Movement founder Dorothy Day's previously unpublished typescript “Told in Context” (1958), edited and with an introduction by Eugene O'Neill biographer Robert M. Dowling, contains an illuminating reminiscence of Day's storied 1917 relationship with twenty-nine-year-old Eugene O'Neill. In one of history's great ironies, the manuscript establishes that the atheist O'Neill initiated a turn to religion for Day, whom the Holy See has since named a “Servant of God”—the first step toward canonization. Along with a rare photograph of Day taken around this time, the article includes a previously unpublished photograph of the Golden Swan Café, otherwise known as the Hell Hole, the legendary Greenwich Village dive bar where Day and O'Neill frequently cavorted. In this unadorned expression of tenderness for O'Neill's memory after his death in 1953, “Told in Context” is a hopeful statement on the possible redemption for an apostate by way of a prospective saint.