Berrigan, Daniel

"Daniel Berrigan." Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Biography In Context. http://ic.galegroup.com (accessed November 2011). Additional nformation derived from the collection.

Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan is a poet, playwright, teacher, and civil disobedience activist.

Daniel Berrigan, who was born May 9, 1921, in Virginia, Minnesota, entered the Order of Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1939 and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1952.

Berrigan is an award-winning poet who has published nineteen collections of poems. His first book of poetry, Time without Number, published by Macmillan in 1957, won the Lamont Poetry Selection Award awarded by the American Academy of Poets. Drafts of the poems written by Berrigan during his mission to Hanoi in 1968 to arrange the release of three captive American pilots, which were published in Night Flight to Hanoi: War Diary with Eleven Poems , are part of this collection.

Berrigan is known as a peace and human rights activist. One of his most dramatic antiwar actions took place in Catonsville, Maryland, on May 17, 1968, when he, his brother Philip, and seven other Roman Catholic activists seized and burnt the files of potential draftees outside a local draft board using homemade napalm. The group members, who became known as "The Catonsville Nine," were found guilty of destroying government property and sentenced to three years in prison. Daniel Berrigan and several other defendants went underground rather than go to jail. Berrigan was captured in August of 1970 and served eighteen months in the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Berrigan wrote the courtroom drama, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, and Prison Poems based on his trial and subsequent imprisonment.

Elizabeth Bartelme is a publishing agent for Macmillan Company. She worked with Daniel Berrigan on a number of his books, including Consequences: Truth and ... , Love, Love at the End , and Night Flight to Hanoi .

Ray Roberts was an editor at Macmillan Company who worked with Berrigan on his book, False Gods, False Men , published in March of 1969.

From the guide to the Daniel Berrigan correspondence and Hanoi poems, 1965-1969, (University of Delaware Library - Special Collections)