Living My Life [Paperback]

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 Lifeis a riveting account of political ferment and ideological turbulence.

• First time in Penguin Classics

• Condensed to half the length of Goldman's original work, this edition is accessible to those interested in the activist and her extraordinary era

Miriam Brody has written biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft and Victoria Woodhull.

Introduction

I. “RED EMMA” WRITES HER LIFE

“The most dangerous woman in America,” as J. Edgar Hoover described her, took pen in hand in June 1928 to write the events of her tumultuous life. “Red Emma” Goldman, who the popular press claimed owned no God, had no religion, would kill all rulers, and overthrow all laws, chose to begin her autobiography on her fifty-ninth birthday, a task she would later say was the “hardest and most painful” she had ever undertaken (Goldman,Nowhere at Home,145). As she wrote about her life, she confronted not only her own loneliness but also the disappointment of her political hopes, the dream lĂ!