Living My Life: An Autobiography of Emma Goldman

Anarchist, journalist, drama critic, advocate of birth control and free love, Emma Goldman was the most famous-and notorious-woman in the early twentieth century. This abridged version of her two-volume autobiography takes her from her birthplace in czarist Russia to the socialist enclaves of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Against a dramatic backdrop of political argument, show trials, imprisonment, and tempestuous romances, Goldman chronicles the epoch that she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of and later disillusionment with Lenin’s Bolshevik experiment, and more. Sounding a call still heard today, Living My Life is a riveting account of political ferment and ideological turbulence.

For this edition (from back cover).
This first single-volume, unabridged autobiography tells the story of a woman
whose life Theodore Dreiser called “the richest of any woman’s of our century. In a fluid and emotional style, Emma Goldman follows her life from her birth in 1869 in Lithuania through her personal triumphs and failures, her political radicalism and deportation, her love affairs, and personal remembrances of the leaders of the radical movement in America, Canada, Europe, and Russia. Johann Most, Alexander Berkman, “Big Bill” Heywood, Max Eastman, Jack London, John Reed, Lenin, Havelock Ellis, Paul Robeson and a score of others all burst into the story caught up in the action and passion of their time.