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The first full authoritative biography of Dorothy Day, American icon, radical pacifist, Catholic convert, and activist whom Pope Francis I compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. After a middle-class Republican childhood and a few years as a party Communist, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for almost fifty years. As an orthodox Catholic, political radical, and a rebel who courted controversy, she attracted three generations of admirers. Day went to jail challenging the draft and the war in Vietnam. She was critical of capitalism and foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern liberalism as political conservatism. Her protests began in 1917, leading to her arrest during the suffrage demonstration outside President Wilson's White House.