In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, 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 prison—one that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.

Alexander Berkman was born of a prosperous Jewish family in Russia in 1870 and emigrated to America as a young man. Deported for political reasons from the U.S. in 1919, he went to the Soviet Union, from which he was in turn expelled. “Expelled again and again,” he once wrote. “Must get off the earth, but am still here.
John William Ward (1922-1985) was an American Studies scholar who taught at Princeton University and Amherst College.  He was President of Amherst College from 1971-1979. His best known book was Andrew Jackson: Symbol for An Age.