In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called "Prison Blossoms." This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism

Through his many books on the history of anarchism, Paul Avrich has done much to dispel the public's conception of the anarchists as mere terrorists. In Anarchist Voices, Avrich lets American anarchists speak for themselves. This book contains 180 interviews conducted by Avrich over a period of 30 years, interviews that portray the human dimensions of a movement much maligned by the authorities and contemporary journalists. Most of the interviewees (anarchists as well as their friends and relatives) were active during the heyday of the movement, between the 1880s and the 1930s. They represent all schools of anarchism and include both famous figures and minor ones, previously overlooked by most historians. Their stories provide a wealth of personal detail about such anarchist luminaries as Emma Goldman and Sacco and Vanzetti. The interviews are grouped in six sections organized around individuals or major aspects of the movement. Each section begins with an explanatory essay, and each interview with a biographical note. Avrich also includes a selected bibliography and a list of anarchist periodicals. This work of impeccable scholarship will be an invaluable resource not only for scholars of anarchism but also for those studying immigration, ethnic politics, the history of education, and legal and labor history. -- "Publishers Weekly"

The Sacco-Vanzetti affair is the most famous and controversial case in American legal history. It divided the nation in the 1920s, and it has continued to arouse deep emotions, giving rise to an enormous literature. Few writers, however, have consulted anarchist sources for the wealth of information available there about the movement of which the defendants were a part. Now Paul Avrich, the preeminent American scholar of anarchism, looks at the case from this new and valuable perspective. This book treats a dramatic and hitherto neglected aspect of the cause célèbre that raised, according to Edmund Wilson, "almost every fundamental question of our political and social system."