In his early years Mr. O’Gorman, a tall man with a longshoreman’s build, lived in Greenwich Village, where he was active in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement. (In later years he lived in relative luxury near Lincoln Center and the ballet and opera that his mother had taught him to love.) In 1965, the State Department employed him to teach American studies in Chile, Argentina and Brazil.

By the mid-1960s, Mr. O’Gorman was literary editor of the Roman Catholic magazine Jubilee. He corresponded with intellectual luminaries like Susan Sontag and Thomas Merton and later collected their thoughts in the book “Prophetic Voices: Ideas and Words on Revolution” 1969). He was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships.

All the while he was searching for a way to combine his political, religious and poetic urges. He found it in Harlem, where he was working as a volunteer for a Catholic antipoverty program. As he told The Daily News of New York in 2006, a priest had challenged him: “There’s a storefront on Madison Avenue and 129th Street, and if you want to do something with it, you can have it.”

Mr. O’Gorman collected donations, using his social connections, and two months later started a children’s library in the store, naming it after Addie Mae Collins, one of four black children killed in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala.

The library grew into a ragtag preschool for about 50 children. Mr. O’Gorman provided lunch from a hot plate, sometimes serving Dinty Moore canned stew with pineapple chunks.

The enterprise reflected Mr. O’Gorman’s playful, rambunctious personality. His stated goal was the expansive one of reversing “the pervasive lack of imagination” in nurturing young minds, and he offered an eclectic program: French and Chinese lessons, classical music and Shakespeare, along with reading, writing and arithmetic.

To Mr. O’Gorman, each child — or “angelic spirit,” in his phrase — demanded special treatment. One boy couldn’t speak a word at age 3, but he had perfect pitch, so teachers used music to teach him the rudiments of speech.