From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 8: The Rigorous Life
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From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 8: The Rigorous Life

Summary: Describes her year as a nursing student–the long hours, fatigue, and the discipline it brought into her life. She admires the Catholic faith of another student and attends Sunday Mass with her. After a year she realizes “my real work was writing and propaganda” and leaves the hospital for Chicago. (DDLW #208).

From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 9: Chicago
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From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 9: Chicago

Summary: Recounts her involvement with the I. W. W. in Chicago and, in some detail, an accidental jail experience. After a move to New Orleans she starts to make “visits” to Church. With the money from selling a book she wrote, she buys a beach house, enters into a common law marriage, and begins to “read and think and ponder, and I notice from my notebooks that it was at this time that I began to pray more earnestly.” (DDLW #209).

From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 6: Reporting
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From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 6: Reporting

Summary: Describes her life as an advocacy journalist depicting the misery of the poor and working class. Engages in picketing, organizing, and anti-conscription activities. An account of being jailed with suffragettes and their hunger strike. Theme of being “tormented by God” and impulses toward faith recurs. (DDLW #207).

From Union Square to Rome: Table of Contents
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From Union Square to Rome: Table of Contents

Summary: An autobiography written as a letter to her brother John. Conversion story genre of her conversion from Communism to Catholicism. Compiled from articles in America and Preservation of the Faith. Discusses Dostoyevsky’s influence on her life and the lonely experience of her conversion Reads as a baptized version of The Eleventh Virgin, with emphasis on her religious experience throughout her life. Expounds on such topics as Eucharist, prayer, Marxism, capitalism, free will and St. Teresa of Avila. (DDLW #2).

From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 1: Why
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From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 1: Why

Summary: Considers the difficult task of reflecting on her life and recounting her path to conversion. Some markers along her way included praying the Psalms, reading Dostoyvsky’s and Mauriac’s novels, and seeing the love of the poor found among those who don’t consciously accept Christ. Links her suffering with others to Christ’s within His Mystical Body. (DDLW #201).

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From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 2: Childhood

Summary: Recounts her first childhood experiences of discovering God in the Bible, helping others, singing in church, meeting her first Catholic – “. . .I was filled with lofty ambitions to be a saint, a natural striving, a thrilling recognition of the possibilities of spiritual adventure.” (DDLW #202).

From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 4: College
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From Union Square to Rome: Chapter 4: College

Summary: Recounts her loneliness and poverty at college as well as her conscious turn away from religion. Describes reading Upton Sinclair, Ignazio Silone, Kropotkin, Tolstoi, and Dostoevsky–the latter two allowing her to cling to faith in God. Her yearning grows to struggle with the masses. “Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” (DDLW #204).