American Saint: The Life of Elizabeth Seton
About this ebook
In this riveting biography of the first American saint, Joan Barthel tells the mesmerizing story of a woman whose life encompassed wealth and poverty, passion and sorrow, love and loss. Elizabeth was born into a prominent New York City family in 1774—when Catholicism was illegal and priests in the city were arrested, and sometimes hanged. Her father was the chief health officer for the Port of New York, and she lived down the block from Alexander Hamilton. She danced at George Washington’s sixty-fifth Birthday Ball in cream slippers, monogrammed.
When Elizabeth and her husband sailed to Italy in a doomed attempt to cure his tuberculosis, she and her family were quarantined in a damp dungeon. And when, after she was widowed, Elizabeth became a Catholic, she was so scorned that people talked of burning down her house. American Saint is the inspiring story of a brave woman who forged the way for other women who followed and who made a name for herself in a world entirely ruled by men. Founder of the Sisters of Charity, she resisted male clerical control of her religious order—and she also started America’s first Catholic school, laying the foundation of an educational system that would help countless children thrive in a new nation.
“Compelling . . . an exquisite story of Seton’s inspiring life. . . . Readers interested in Catholic history and U.S. history should not overlook this important biography.” —Publishers Weekly
“Barthel is a fine and insightful observer of this larger-than-life woman who was so far ahead two hundred years ago that we’re still catching up with her.” —Gloria Steinem
Includes a foreword by Maya Angelou
About the author
JOAN BARTHEL is the author of A Death in Canaan, which spent many weeks on the bestseller list and was made into a CBS TV movie that was nominated for an Emmy Award. Following A Death in Canaan, Barthel wrote A Death in California and collaborated with Rosemary Clooney on Girl Singer. Barthel has written profiles of celebrities for such publications as The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post Magazine. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
MAYA ANGELOU, who contributed the foreword, is a poet and teacher who became famous with her 1970 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Born in St. Louis, she was raised there and in Stamps, Arkansas, where she felt the sting of racial discrimination. She has lived in San Francisco, where she returned to high school and gave birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation; in Egypt, Ghana and New York. Angelou, 85, speaks seven languages; in 2000 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She now lives in North Carolina, where she is the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.
