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, 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. These and other letters from "the Staten Island years" will appear in an edition of Day's selected letters, forthcoming from the Marquette University Press.