Williams, Michael

Williams, Michael

(1877–1950) journalist; born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Emigrating to the U.S.A. as a penniless youth, he was a newspaper reporter in Boston, New York, and San Francisco before a 1912 conversion to active Catholicism, which he recounted in a colorful memoir, The Book of High Romance (1918). Seeking to create a Catholic intellectual periodical under lay auspices, he cofounded Commonweal magazine (1914) and was its editor until 1937.