Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

by Alexander Berkman, John William Ward (Introduction)

Overview

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 prison—one that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780940322349
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	09/30/1999
Series:	NYRB Classics Series , #9
Pages:	500
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.38(d)

About the Author

Alexander Berkman was born of a prosperous Jewish family in Russia in 1870 and emigrated to America as a young man. Deported for political reasons from the U.S. in 1919, he went to the Soviet Union, from which he was in turn expelled. “Expelled again and again,” he once wrote. “Must get off the earth, but am still here.

John William Ward (1922-1985) was an American Studies scholar who taught at Princeton University and Amherst College.  He was President of Amherst College from 1971-1979. His best known book was Andrew Jackson: Symbol for An Age.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Editorial Note 13

Part I The Awakening and Its Toll

I The Call of Homestead 21

II The Seat of War 39

III The Spirit of Pittsburgh 45

IV The Attentat 49

V The Third Degree 53

VI The Jail 59

VII The Trial 95

Part II The Penitentiary

I Desperate Thoughts 101

II The Will to Live 111

III Spectral Silence 119

IV A Ray of Light 123

V The Shop 127

VI My First Letter 133

VII Wingie 137

VIII To the Girl 143

IX Persecution 147

X The Yegg 153

XI The Route Sub Rosa 165

XII "Zuchthausbluethen" 167

XIII The Judas 175

XIV The Dip 183

XV The Urge of Sex 187

XVI The Wardens Threat 193

XVII The "Basket" Cell 201

XVIII The Solitary 203

XIX Memory-Guests 213

XX A Day in the Cell-House 221

XXI The Deeds of the Good to the Evil 239

XXII The Grist of the Prison-Mill 245

XXIII The Scales of Justice 257

XXIV Thoughts That Stole Out of Prison 265

XXV How Shall the Depths Cry? 269

XXVI Hiding the Evidence 277

XXVII Love's Dungeon Flower 283

XXVIII For Safety 293

XXIX Dreams of Freedom 295

XXX Whitewashed Again 301

XXXI And By All Forgot, We Rot and Rot" 307

XXXII The Deviousness of Reform Law Applied 315

XXXIII The Tunnel 319

XXXIV The Death of Dick 325

XXXV An Alliance with the Birds 327

XXXVI The Underground 335

XXXVII Anxious Days 341

XXXVIII "How Men Their Brothers Maim" 347

XXXIX A New Plan of Escape 353

XL Done to Death 359

XLI The Shock at Buffalo 365

XLII Marred Lives 377

XLIII "Passing the Love of Woman" 385

XLIV Love's Daring 393

XLV The Bloom of "The Barren Staff" 399

XLVI A Child's Heart-Hunger 405

XLVII Chum 409

XLVIII Last Days 415

Part III The Workhouse 423

Part IV The Resurrection 431

Diary 1910-1911, 1916 457

Bibliography 507

Acknowledgments 509

Index 511