Thirty years ago, on July 31, 1989, Michael Harrington died in Larchmont, New York, a victim of the cancer that he had battled since 1985. He was sixty-one years old. Among Harrington’s enduring legacies are his authorship of The Other America: Poverty in the United States, the 1962 book that helped spark the War on Poverty during the Lyndon Johnson administration, his service as a political adviser to Dr Martin Luther King Jr (“You know,” Dr King once jokingly told Harrington, “we didn’t even know we were poor until we read your book”), and his leading role in the 1982 founding of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Harrington was raised in a devoutly Catholic household in St Louis, educated at Jesuit institutions, and gained his first left-wing political experience in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. In his last years, confronting his own mortality, he found the familiar religious phrases of his childhood echoing in Latin in his thoughts, especially Magnificat anima mea Dominum (My soul doth magnify the glory of the Lord).

Harrington hadn’t actually been a believer since departing the Catholic Worker for the socialist movement in 1952, at age twenty-four. Even the prospect of imminent death wasn’t going to change that; shortly before the end, he told his childhood companion and cousin Peggy Fitzgibbon, a nun, that if upon dying he somehow came face to face with God in heaven, he intended to accuse Him of mumbling.