Peter Maurin (; May 9, 1877 – May 15, 1949) was a French Catholic social activist, theologian, and De La Salle Brother who founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933 with Dorothy Day. Maurin expressed his philosophy through short pieces of verse that became known as Easy Essays. Influenced by the contemporary work of G. K. Chesterton and Vincent McNabb, he was one of the foremost promoters of the back-to-the-land movement and of Catholic distributism in the United States. He was also influenced by Peter Kropotkin, an anarchist. Biography He was born Pierre Joseph Orestide Maurin into a poor farming family in the village of Oultet in the Languedoc region of southern France, where he was one of 24 children. After spending time in the De La Salle Brothers, Maurin served in the Sillon movement of Marc Sangnier until he became discouraged by the Sillonist shift from personalist action towards political action. He briefly moved to Saskatchewan to try his hand at homesteading, but was discouraged both by the death of his partner in a hunting accident and by the harsh conditions and rugged individualism that characterized his years of residence in the region. He then traveled throughout the American east for a few years, and eventually settled in New York. For a ten-year period, Maurin was not a practicing Catholic "because I was not living as a Catholic should." In the mid-1920s, Maurin was working as a French tutor in the New York suburbs. It was at this time Maurin experienced a religious conversion, inspired by the life of Francis of Assisi. He ceased charging for his lessons and asked only that students give any sum they thought appropriate. This was likely prompted by reading about St. Francis, who viewed labor as a gift to the greater community, not a mode of self-promotion. During this portion of his life, he began composing the poetry that would later be called his Easy Essays. Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker "Peter Maurin first met Dorothy Day in December 1932." She had just returned from Washington, D.C., where she had covered the Hunger March for Commonweal and America magazines. At the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, 1932, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, Day had prayed for inspiration for her future work. She came back to her New York apartment to find Maurin awaiting her