Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian emigre, 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 prisonone that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.

Alexander Berkman (1870-1936) was born of a well-to-do Jewish family in Russia and emigrated to America as a young man. Deported for political reasons from the United States in 1919, he moved to the Soviet Union, from which he was in turn expelled.