Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

"What lessons there are in this book! Like all truthful documents it makes us love and hate our fellow men, doubt ourselves, doubt our society. . . . It tends to complicate the present simplicity of our moral attitudes. It tends to make us more mature."—Hutchins Hapgood

"[Berkman's] prison memoirs are fantastic. . . . They are absolutely extraordinary."—Kay Boyle

"No other book discusses so frankly the criminal ways of closed prison society."—Kenneth Rexroth

After his attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick—the architect of the Homestead Steel massacre—in 1892, Alexander Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania. The result was what has become a classic political memoir. Originally published in 1912 by Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Press, this is the first completely annotated edition of a book known for its keen insights into both the motivations behind "extremist" acts and the oppressive features of prison life. It is also the moving story of one man's ethical and political education, his humanizing evolution from young revolutionary ideologue with little time for "common criminals" to sympathetic comrade of his fellow inmates.

Alexander Berkman was a leading writer and participant in the twentieth-century anarchist movement. Deported from New York City to his native Russia in 1919, he saw first hand the failure of the Bolshevik revolution, and wrote The Russian Tragedy and What Is Anarchism?

Barry Pateman is the curator of the Emma Goldman Papers at the University of California Berkeley and is the editor of Chomsky on Anarchism and The Blast.