Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

by Berkman, Alexander; Ward, John William

• ISBN13: 9780940322349
• ISBN10: 094032234X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-09-30
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
PART I: THE AWAKENING AND ITS TOLL
The Call of Homestead	5	(21)
The Seat of War	26	(5)
The Spirit of Pittsburgh	31	(5)
The Attentat	36	(3)
The Third Degree	39	(7)
The Jail	46	(41)
The Trial	87	(6)
PART II: THE PENITENTIARY
Desperate Thoughts	93	(17)
The Will to Live	110	(7)
Spectral Silence	117	(4)
A Ray of Light	121	(4)
The Shop	125	(8)
My First Letter	133	(5)
Wingie	138	(8)
To the Girl	146	(5)
Persecution	151	(7)
The Yegg	158	(15)
The Route Sub Rosa	173	(3)
``Zuchthausbluthen''	176	(10)
The Judas	186	(10)
The Dip	196	(5)
The Urge of Sex	201	(8)
The Warden's Threat	209	(10)
The ``Basket'' Cell	219	(3)
The Solitary	222	(11)
Memory-Guests	233	(8)
A Day in the Cell-House	241	(23)
The Deeds of the Good to the Evil	264	(6)
The Grist of the Prison-Mill	270	(16)
The Scales of Justice	286	(10)
Thoughts that Stole Out of Prison	296	(4)
How Shall the Depths Cry?	300	(9)
Hiding the Evidence	309	(8)
Love's Dungeon Flower	317	(12)
For Safety	329	(2)
Dreams of Freedom	331	(7)
Whitewashed Again	338	(7)
``And by All Forgot, We Rot and Rot''	345	(9)
The Deviousness of Reform Law Applied	354	(5)
The Tunnel	359	(7)
The Death of Dick	366	(2)
An Alliance with the Birds	368	(10)
The Underground	378	(8)
Anxious Days	386	(7)
``How Men Their Brothers Maim''	393	(6)
A New Plan of Escape	399	(6)
Done to Death	405	(8)
The Shock at Buffalo	413	(12)
Marred Lives	425	(11)
``Passing the Love of Woman''	436	(10)
Love's Daring	446	(7)
The Bloom of ``The Barren Staff''	453	(6)
A Child's Heart-Hunger	459	(4)
Chum	463	(9)
Last Days	472	(9)
PART III
The Workhouse	481	(10)
PART IV
The Resurrection	491