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  • All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day
  • Anne Klejment
All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day. Edited by Robert Ellsberg. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 2010. Pp. xxiii, 456. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-874-62010-0.)

Although Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness (New York, 1952) has served as an autobiography, she stated that she had intended it to focus only on what had led her to God. For a more comprehensive portrait of Day’s life and spirituality, one may turn to an outpouring of primary source anthologies and histories published since her death in 1980. One of the essential works is All the Way to Heaven, a collection of her selected letters, edited by Robert Ellsberg. Scholar, editor, and personal friend of Day, Ellsberg has produced an accessible and informative volume that will serve the needs of casual reader and serious researcher.

This well-designed volume begins with the editor’s revealing introduction to Day as a letter writer. Each of the book’s six chronological sections is organized around a broad theme. Ellsberg has written a brief introduction to each part and throughout the volume provides notes for historical context and identification. An index of personal names and book titles concludes the volume.

The letters date from the 1920s to several months before her death. Ironically, the anthology begins with a letter to Margaret Sanger that expresses Day’s regret that the Birth Control League was unable to “afford a regular publicity director” (p. 3). Other early letters discuss Day’s publication agenda and document the evolution of her relationship with her domestic partner, Forster Batterham. These colorful letters explore her social, emotional, and religious worlds. In particular, the graphic letters to him expose the dimensions of her emotional torment over the nature of their relationship after her conversion. The love letters convey the story of a struggle between equally stubborn partners and outline her turmoil as she alternately tried to convince him to marry or to distance themselves from their powerful allure.

Following Peter Maurin’s chaste entry into Day’s life in 1932, her letters begin to reflect a remarkable spiritual and emotional maturity as she faced the challenges of leading the Catholic Worker movement and parenting a [End Page 611] daughter whose interests seem so different from those of an already famous mother. Many of the longer letters display the literary realism that Day earlier acknowledged as her style. Rich in detail about life and the Catholic Worker, these letters explored tenets of her spirituality for which her devotees now remember her. In a 1934 letter she wrote of “spiritual hospitality” and how “all those little frittering things which take up one’s time are quite as important, may time more so in the sight of God, than answering letters or keeping one’s files up to date” (p. 59), an insight that mirrored her devotion to St. Thérèse of Lisieux and underscored her distaste for turnstile charity. Other deeply personal letters document Day’s relationship with her daughter and her anxiety for Tamar’s spiritual, emotional, and material well-being.

The bulk of the letters focuses on matters pertaining to the Catholic Worker movement and its spiritual underpinnings. In these, Day sometimes dreamt of new initiatives such as a retreat center for alcoholic priests and a women’s bakery, which went unrealized.

This collection of letters, most of them previously unpublished, reveals a spiritually grounded and witty woman who daily addressed thorny human problems under the scrutiny of admirers and ready critics alike. The careful reader will be rewarded with rich insight into the life and spirituality of the last century’s most significant American Catholic layperson whose tremendous spiritual legacy has yet to be fully appreciated. This excellent volume should become an indispensable source for researchers as well as a spiritual classic.

Anne Klejment
University of St. Thomas
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