I'm going to write a book about Dorothy and Eugene!
So much about Dorothy Day and Eugene O'Neill being friends -
Why has no one written a book about this friendship??
I ask this rhetorically.
She’s with her buddy Eugene O’Neill - the Eugene O’Neill - in a bar called the Hell Hole. O’Neill, with "bitter mouth" and "monotonous grating voice," is reciting one of his favorite poems, Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years. By way of response, Dorothy sings “Frankie and Johnny.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/a-saint-for-difficult-people/513821/
Once a place known as a hangout for thugs, the Golden Swan had added
bohemian writers and radicals to its community of patrons. Late in
1917 a young Dorothy Day became one of its clientele - she had turned
twenty on November 8. Another patron was the playwright Eugene
O’Neill. Several decades later, when The Golden Swan was no more,
O’Neill used his memories of it as the setting for his play “The
Iceman Cometh.”
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/national-cw-e-mail-list/ijv0YWG5HEg
discussion of Dorothy's relationship with Eugene O'Neill, where he talks of Dorothy as being one of the models for the character of Josie in "Moon for the Misbegotten." I think Christine Ell was the principal model for that character but probably Dorothy was another. In 1973 I took Dorothy to see the legendary performance on Broadway starring Jason Robards and Coleen Dewhurst; it was overpowering. After-wards, Dorothy and I went to a nearby diner for coffee and during our conversation she said that she thought it was a "religious play." I held my tongue but I thought to myself: "Yes, it's all about guilt, remorse and shame, the very things that religion has always trafficked in." Both O'Neill and his brother Jamie, on whom the character Robards played was based, were serious alcoholics. Dorothy, in spite of some "prodigious" drinking at the Hell Hole, was not. She once said to me, regarding her drinking, "When you stay up all night you have to have something to keep you going" and she resented Malcolm Cowley's remark in "Exiles' Return" that she "could drink them" (the gangsters) "under the table" at the Hell Hole. When O'Neill was dying in the Sheaton Hotel in Boston in 1953 Dorothy asked Cardinal Cushing to go to his bedside but he had died.
https://personalist.livejournal.com/65109.html
Twenty year old Dorothy Day is a reporter - and a suffragette. She is also part of a New York
socialist group that meets to drink and discuss. It includes Eugene O'Neill. The group is free-
thinking and free-acting. The pregnant Dorothy has an abortion and moves away from New York
https://www.catholicenquiry.com/all-docman-links/hearing-god-s-call/76-film-review-session-7-entertaining-angels/file
Dorothy Day recounts the day when she and O’Neill witnessed O’Neill’s friend Louis Holliday inject enough heroin to kill himself in a Greenwich Village bar in 1918. The incident affected both Day and O’Neill deeply. Soon after Holliday’s death, Day left the Village and became a nursing student, and Eugene left for Provincetown. The death haunted O’Neill all his life.
https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/oneills-dark-passage
Back in New York, she hung out in the Village, went to work for another socialist magazine, The Liberator, and spent time with Eugene O'Neill, who recited for her the poem "The Hound of Heaven." She stumbled into St. Joseph's church, the oldest Catholic Church in Manhattan, and later recalled, "I seemed to feel the faith of those about me and I longed for their faith." Instead, she fell in love, got pregnant, had an abortion and worked as a nurse. Then she got married, went to Europe and got divorced. Hungry for the experience of life, her own existence seemed without ballast or direction.
http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/people/dorothy-day.html
Shaughnessy rounds out this study with a poignant epilogue focusing on O'Neill's funeral and an extended meditation by Dorothy Day, a close friend of O'Neill's in earlier days but one whom he never saw after her conversion to Catholicism.
http://www.eoneill.com/references/x00970.htm
The letter from W. Somerset Maugham includes Sheaffer’s typed comment. His letter to Dorothy Day has Day’s responses jotted in the margin.
http://www.eoneill.com/cc/highlights/index.htm
http://www.eoneill.com/cc/highlights/items/020/s020.htm