Dorothy Day was 8 when her family moved into a tenement flat over a tavern on Chicago's South Side 

It was a big step down for the Day family. They had been practically wiped out by the big 1906 San Francisco earthquake. John Day, a journalist, had lost his home and was without a job. The curtains Dorothy's mother, Grace, made from remnants were hung from fishing rods. Fruit crates served as book cases. Nail kegs became kitchen stools.

Dorothy was so ashamed of her home that, returning from school, she would enter the door of a better, more impressive building so that her schoolmates wouldn't know the kind of circumstances she was living in. Her mother suffered blinding headaches and went through several miscarriages. Dorothy's understanding of the shame people feel when they aren't making it surely dates from this time.

It was in this period of her life that Dorothy began to overcome the anti-Catholic prejudices that her father had often expressed. Dorothy would recall the impact of searching one day for a friend and discovering her friend's mother, Mrs. Barrett, praying on her knees at the side of her bed. Without dismay or embarrassment, she looked up at Dorothy, told her where to find her daughter, and returned to her prayer.

"I felt a burst of love toward Mrs. Barrett that I have never forgotten, a feeling of gratitude and happiness that warmed my heart," Dorothy wrote in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. This brief event was, when Dorothy looked back on it, a significant factor in her later conversion to Christianity and her joining the Catholic Church.

John Day finally got a job as sports editor of a Chicago paper called The Inter Ocean. The Day family moved into a large and comfortable house on the city's North Side.

The great events in Dorothy's life at this time had mainly to do with books. Though her father was a man with many prejudices, he was a reader and book lover, and this as well as his journalistic bent rubbed off on his eldest daughter.

In the library of the house, Dorothy first read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Charles Dickens' Bleak House and Little Dorritt, and other books that stirred her awareness of injustice in the world and also offered images of sanctity. These books she would read again and again for the rest of her life. There were other books, too, the sort her father regarded as "trash." (Dorothy hid behind a bookcase a copy of Swinburn's poem, Tristan, with its drawing of lovers lying in the grass.)

Books were very much Dorothy's companions and often mentors throughout her life. She would have appreciated Erasmus' confessional boast: "When I have money I buy books, and if anything is left over I buy food and clothes."

Perhaps the book that had the most impact on her in her mid-teens was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Unlike books about social injustice by Dickens and Hugo, here was a story set in the present—not in Europe, but in her own Chicago, in the city's stockyards and slaughterhouses. Sinclair's hero was a Lithuanian immigrant, the only member of his family not utterly destroyed by squalor and injustice. He finally commits himself to struggle for a just social order by joining the Socialist Party.

Sinclair's vivid description of filth and violence in the meat industry so shocked its readers that the book is given credit for congressional passage of tough meat-inspection laws. Sinclair, however, had hoped to stimulate more profound social change. "I aimed at the public's heart," he said, "and by accident hit it in the stomach."

But he did reach Dorothy Day's heart. She had responsibility for much of the care of the newest addition to the family, John Jr., and, stirred by Sinclair's novel, she began to push his baby carriage further and further southwest, not far from the parts of the city she had once been so glad to leave behind. "I walked for miles, exploring interminable gray streets, fascinating in their dreary sameness, past tavern after tavern, where I envisioned such scenes as the Polish wedding party in Sinclair's story."

As would be typical of Dorothy for the rest of her life, she found a kind of beauty in the midst of urban desolation.

"There were tiny gardens and vegetable patches in the yards. Often there were rows of corn, stunted but still recognizable, a few tomato plants, and always the vegetables bordered by flowers." Drab streets were transformed by pungent odors: geranium and tomato plants, garlic, olive oil, roasting coffee, bread and rolls in bakery ovens. "Here," she said, "was enough beauty to satisfy me."

Only 15 years old, she looked at the world with wide-open eyes and a vulnerable heart many of us might envy. Pondering the lives of the people living in these hard-pressed neighborhoods, yet rich in so many ways, she had a vivid sense of who she would become.

"From that time on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests would be mine: I had received a call, a vocation, a direction in life."

Dorothy was an intense, sensitive, quiet young woman and a first-rate student. For her Greek class she translated the New Testament into English. She did so well at Waller High School that at age 16 she was awarded a scholarship to go to the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Moving to Urbana in September 1914 meant many things, not least that she was no longer living under the same roof with her father, few of whose views she agreed with. The two were often at daggers' points.

She was resolved not to ask her father for financial help once she was at the university. Inspired by reading and her long walks on the South Side, she was determined to support herself by her own labor. "I was mindful of girls who worked in stores and factories through their youth and afterward married men who were slaves in the same factories. The Marxist slogan, 'Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,' seemed to me a most stirring battle cry."

Her view was now clearly radical—charity wasn't enough. It wasn't enough just to assist the victims of social injustice; what was needed was work to get rid of the social evils themselves. There were day nurseries for children. "But why," she asked, "didn't fathers get money enough to take care of their families so that mothers didn't have to work?"