In 1924, Dorothy Day used the proceeds from the sale of film rights to her novel, The Eleventh Virgin to purchase a bungalow overlooking the beach at Huguenot, on Staten Island, New York. There, over the next three years, she contracted a common-law marriage to Forster Batterham, conceived their daughter Tamar (born March 4, 1926), and became a Catholic, all the while continuing to turn out serialized novels, children's stories, and gardening columns at a prodigious clip. (Earlier, Dorothy had written a friend that she had "cramps in both arms from typing so much.")

There is very little in the Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection from this period in Dorothy's life. Our holdings were augmented recently, however, with the acquisition of eight letters she wrote to a friend from her years in Chicago - Llewellyn Jones, then literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post. Portions of several of these letters are displayed here, along with related photographs.