Give us a sense of the kinds of people that she associated with, what she did. I mean, she had some amazingly rich experiences, but it was decidedly not a life of piety. Let's talk about Dorothy's teenage and early adult years. Well, Kate Hennessy, welcome to FRESH AIR. Writer Kate Hennessy is Day's youngest granddaughter, and she relied on family letters and diaries, interviews and her own memories for her new book "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty." A new biography that illuminates Day's activism and her complex personal life comes from someone who knows both well. She died in 1980 and is now a candidate for sainthood in the church. Day fed thousands of people, wrote newspaper columns, novels and plays, was arrested several times in protests, chain smoked for years, at a time lived on farms as part of an agrarian Back-to-the-Land strand of the Catholic Worker Movement. They led the Catholic Worker Movement from its beginnings in the Great Depression through the Vietnam War era. She co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist faith-based movement for social change that still exists today. But Dorothy Day's story is anything but predictable. If I were to tell you we're going to talk about one of the most important American Catholic leaders of the 20th century, you might not picture a woman whose early years included a Bohemian lifestyle in New York, an abortion and a child born out of wedlock.
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