NYRB Classics discussion

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist



Publication Date: September 30, 1999
Pages: 500
Introduction by John William Ward.
Originally published in 1912.

In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, anarchist, and lover of Emma Goldman, attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The act was intended both as retribution for the massacre of workers in the Homestead strike and as an incitement to revolution. Captured and sentenced to serve a prison term of twenty-two years, Berkman struggled to make sense of the shadowy and brutalized world of the priso—one that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.