DOROTHY DAY-CATHOLIC WORKER COLLECTION
PETER MAURIN PAPERS, ca. 1909-

Biographical Note

Peter Maurin (1877-1949), whom Dorothy Day considered the true founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was born to peasant stock in the village of Oultet in the Languedoc region of southern France. As a youth and young man, he was a member of the Christian Brothers teaching order and the Sillon movement. He emigrated to Canada in 1909; after a homesteading venture failed, he entered the United States several years later. He traveled around the country, hopping freights and engaging in various types of manual labor, before finding more remunerative employment as a French teacher in Chicago. He spoke little about those years but admitted to Dorothy Day that he “was not living as a Catholic should.”

In the early 1920s, Maurin moved to upstate New York and underwent a religious conversion, He led a life of voluntary poverty, being especially influenced by St. Francis of Assisi, read widely, and formulated the three-point program of action (roundtable discussions, houses of hospitality, and farming communes) he would present to Dorothy Day in December 1932. To get his “points” across, he also began to compose the prose poems that became known as “Easy Essays.” After his successful “indoctrination” of Day, she agreed to start a newspaper, which she named The Catholic Worker. (Maurin would have preferred that it be called The Catholic Radical). He was so disappointed with the first issue’s lack of emphasis on his program that he absented himself for several months. He returned as a “contributor” rather than a staff member. Peter Maurin remained with the New York Catholic Worker community for the remainder of his life, dividing his time between the house of hospitality and the farm in Easton, Pennsylvania. He became much in demand as a speaker, though hosts sometimes mistook their guest lecturer for a tramp. The advent of dementia forced Maurin’s withdrawal from public activities after about ten years.

For more information on Peter Maurin’s life and writings see:

   Day, Dorothy, with Francis J. Sicius. Peter Maurin: Apostle to the World. Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2004. 

   Ellis, Marc H. Peter Maurin: Prophet in the Twentieth Century. New York: Paulist Press, 1981.

   Maurin, Peter. The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker, edited by Lincoln Rice. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.  

  Sheehan, Arthur. Peter Maurin: Gay Believer. Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1959.
 

Scope and Content

This series includes Maurin’s surviving correspondence and manuscripts, along with writings about him and documents that have come to light in recent years, such as his death certificate. Most of the manuscripts are Maurin’s "arrangements" of others’ thoughts (notably the writings of Eric Gill, rather than his original "Easy Essays." (There are several folders of these). Arrangement is by type of material and alphabetical or chronological thereunder.

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