Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

By Alexander Berkman
Introduction by John William Ward

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.

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Reviews

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

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is above all else the story of the education of one man.... [We] watch Berkman become humanized, tolerant, able to sympathize with the most diverse and antagonistic individuals.... No other book discusses so frankly the criminal ways of the closed prison society, its homosexuality or extortion. No other political prisoner even remotely approaches Berkman's sympathy for what most of the revolutionaries refer to contemptuously as common criminals.
— Kenneth Rexroth

Also see:

On the Yard By Malcolm Braly Introduction by Jonathan Lethem A major American novel, and arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison, On the Yard is a book of penetrating psychological realism.

My Century By Aleksander Wat Translated from the Polish by Richard Lourie Foreword by Czeslaw Milosz The great Polish poet Aleksander Wat's memoirs provide a powerful and moving account of life in Eastern Europe in the terrible twentieth century.

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