Harrington, Michael (1928–1989)

MICHAEL HARRINGTON was perhaps the most prominent American socialist from the 1960s until his death in 1989, both as a writer and political activist. Born into an Irish middle-class family in St. Louis, Missouri, Harrington graduated in 1947 from Holy Cross College, a Jesuit institution, and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he studied law at Yale University. After a year, he went to Chicago where he earned a master's degree from the University of Chicago. He started his activist career in New York in 1951, when he joined the Catholic Worker movement, an organization within the lay apostolate founded by Dorothy Day during the Great Depression.

After having rejected the Catholic theology, Harrington left the Catholic Worker movement two years later and joined the Young ...