The University of Delaware Library exhibition “Daniel Berrigan: Poet, Activist, Priest,” open from Oct. 25 through Dec. 16, celebrate the life and career of this important American author and political activist who passed away at the age of 94 on April 30, 2016. 

Berrigan was born in Virginia, Minnesota, on May 9, 1921. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1952. 

In 1954, Berrigan was assigned to teach theology at the Jesuit Brooklyn Preparatory School and three years later was appointed professor of New Testament studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

Berrigan had begun writing poetry as well, and in 1957 was awarded the Lamont Prize for his first poetry collection Time Without Number. 

While on a sabbatical from Le Moyne in 1963, Berrigan traveled to Paris and met French Jesuits who were concerned about the developing social and political situation in Indochina. Taking inspiration from this, he and his brother Philip, who was also a Roman Catholic priest, founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, a group which organized protests against the escalating war in Vietnam, and Daniel Berrigan’s career as a political activist was launched.

Daniel and Philip Berrigan, along with seven other Catholic activists, are perhaps best known as members of what came to be called the Catonsville nine. The group broke into the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board on May 17, 1968, and using homemade napalm destroyed nearly 400 draft files. The protesters were arrested and convicted of conspiracy and destruction of government property. Berrigan was sentenced to three years in prison but went into hiding. He remained at large until he was captured on Aug. 11, 1970. He was released from prison in1972. 

The events in Catonsville subsequently became the basis for Daniel Berrigan’s free-verse play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, which in 1972 was made into a film produced by the actor Gregory Peck. Although Berrigan is remembered for his protests against the Vietnam War, he remained committed to working towards a world without war, nuclear weapons, poverty, disease and racial injustice right up until his death.

Berrigan was the author or co-author of more than 50 books, including 19 volumes of poetry. In addition to his award-winning first book of poems Time Without Number, Berrigan’s other collections include Prison Poems (1973); Tulips in the Prison Yard: Selected Poems of Daniel Berrigan (1992); and And the Risen Bread: Selected and New Poems 1957-1997 (1998). His political activism was a frequent focus of Berrigan’s writing and he also wrote extensively, on biblical texts and theology, often relating these topics to contemporary political and social issues.

The exhibition “Daniel Berrigan: Poet, Activist, Priest,” which will be on view in the Information Room of the Morris Library will feature books and other materials from all periods of Daniel Berrigan’s career. The exhibition, which is curated by Timothy Murray, head of the Special Collections Department, is drawn largely from the collection of the important American bookseller and collector Robert A. Wilson who knew Daniel Berrigan and built an extensive collection of the author’s work which now resides in the Special Collections of the University of Delaware Library. An online version of the exhibition will be available.

About Special Collections

Holdings of Special Collections of the University of Delaware Library include books, manuscripts, maps, prints, photographs, broadsides, periodicals, pamphlets, ephemera and realia from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. The collections complement the Library's general collections with particular strengths in the subject areas of the arts; English, Irish and American literature; history and Delawareana; horticulture; and history of science and technology. Special Collections is located on the second floor of the Morris Library.