The Eleventh Virgin

Before she became a Catholic and co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day was a young radical in Greenwich Village, and this 1924 novel draws directly on those years. Her stand-in, June Henreddy, moves through the bohemian world of pre-war New York: left-wing journalism, jail after a suffrage protest, cheap rooms, and a love affair that leaves deep wounds. The book follows her from a restless girlhood into an adulthood shaped by politics, longing, and hard lessons about the men she loves. Day later dismissed the novel and even regretted writing it, yet it remains the frankest record of the life she left behind. This free PDF and EPUB edition recovers a candid, autobiographical story from one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable American lives.