Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

In 1892, anarchist and Russian émigré Alexander Berkman was apprehended for the failed assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick. This was a retaliatory act meant to incite revolution against those who had violently suppressed the Homestead Steel Strike — but for Berkman, it was a crime that ultimately led to his 14 year incarceration in Pennsylvania’s notorious Western Penitentiary. First published by Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth Press, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is a classic of autobiographical literature that recounts his experiences in the brutal, dehumanizing world of America's prison system.

By : Alexander Berkman (1870 - 1936)

00 - As Introductory



01 - The Call of Homestead



02 - The Seat of War



03 - The Spirit of Pittsburgh



04 - The Attentat



05 - The Third Degree



06 - The Jail



07 - The Trial



08 - Desperate Thoughts



09 - The Will to Live



10 - Spectral Silence



11 - A Ray of Light



12 - The Shop



13 - My First Letter



14 - Wingie



15 - To the Girl



16 - Persecution



17 - The Yegg



18 - The Route Sub Rosa



19 - ''Zuchthausbluethen''



20 - The Judas



21 - The Dip



22 - The Urge of Sex



23 - The Warden's Threat



24 - The ''Basket'' Cell



25 - The Solitary



26 - Memory-Guests



27 - A Day in the Cell-House



28 - The Deeds of the Good to the Evil



29 - The Grist of the Prison-Mill



30 - The Scales of Justice



31 - Thoughts that Stole Out of Prison



32 - How Shall the Depths Cry?



33 - Hiding the Evidence



34 - Love's Dungeon Flower



35 - For Safety



36 - Dreams of Freedom



37 - Whitewashed Again



38 - ''And by All Forgot, We Rot and Rot''



39 - The Deviousness of Reform Law Applied



40 - The Tunnel



41 - The Death of Dick



42 - An Alliance With the Birds



43 - The Underground



44 - Anxious Days



45 - ''How Men Their Brothers Maim''



46 - A New Plan of Escape



47 - Done to Death



48 - The Shock at Buffalo



49 - Marred Lives



50 - ''Passing the Love of Woman''



51 - Love's Daring



52 - The Bloom of ''The Barren Staff''



53 - A Child's Heart-Hunger



54 - Chum



55 - Last Days



56 - The Workhouse



57 - The Resurrection


The book begins with the details of how Berkman came to be imprisoned: as an anarchist activist, he had attempted to assassinate wealthy industrialist Henry Clay Frick, manager of the Carnegie steel works in Pennsylvania. Frick had been responsible for crushing the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers during the Homestead Strike, in which nine union workers and seven guards were killed. However, although Berkman shot Frick two times -Berkman was subdued before the third shot- and stabbed him several times in the leg with a poisoned knife, Frick survived, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Berkman had hoped to awaken the consciousness of the oppressed American people—an attentat—but, as the book goes on to detail, America lacked the political culture to interpret his actions. Even fellow prisoners from the union he was defending failed to see his political intent.

The bulk of the book is set during Berkman's years in prison. Written in first-person, present-tense English (a language that was new to Berkman), it reads like a diary, though it was in fact written after Berkman's release. It is a coming-of-age story that tracks Berkman's difficult loss of his youthful sentimental idealism as he struggles with the physical and psychological conditions of prison life, at times bringing him to the verge of suicide.

As he gets to know the other prisoners, he has nothing but disdain and disgust for them as people, though he sees them as victims of an unjust system. "They are not of my world", he writes. "I would aid them", he says, being "duty bound to the victims of social injustice. But I cannot be friends with them ... they touch no chord in my heart." Gradually, though, Berkman's self-imposed distance and moral high ground begins to crumble as he comes to see the flawed humanity in everyone, including himself.

The Prison Memoirs is also, in part, a tribute to his relationship with fellow anarchist Emma Goldman, to whom he refers repeatedly throughout the book as "the Girl". She is the only person to maintain correspondence with Berkman in prison, and defends him from criticism on the outside, helping him upon his release. The book tracks the development of Berkman's ideas on political violence, and his ruminations often read like a dialog with Goldman, whom he knows intimately.

One of the notable features of the Prison Memoirs is its treatment of homosexuality in prison. Carol Douglas, writing of the book in off our backs, says that Berkman "described how his initial horror at homosexuality in the prison where he was confined gave way to love for another man". In his 2008 study, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917, Terence Kissack describes Prison Memoirs as "one of the most important political texts dealing with homosexuality to have been written by an American before the 1950s".

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