In November 2007, Boston lawyer Peter Resnik was driving his client Robert Day to a courthouse in western Massachusetts. It was pro bono work. Day was a homeless veteran sleeping in a doorway on Tremont Street. Resnik was helping him clear up an old traffic ticket standing in the way of public housing. As the wind-stripped landscape raced by outside and the pair got to talking about Thanksgiving, Resnik felt the distance between him and Day shrink.

“Turkey soup was a common element in both our families,” recalls Resnik (LAW’70). “So many parts of Rob’s life seemed so normal. He was in the army a number of years and served in Europe. He was aware of what was going on in the city, in politics, in sports, and literature.”

Resnik and Day had met some months earlier on Boston Common, but a friendship was taking shape in that car, a relationship that would yield something neither man could have anticipated, a literary movement of sorts: book clubs for the homeless.