Paul Avrich – författare

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."

From the celebrated Russian intellectuals Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin to the little-known Australian bootmaker and radical speaker J. W. Fleming, this book probes the lives and personalities of representative anarchists.

This is the first paperback edition of a moving appraisal of the infamous Haymarket bombing (May 1886) and the trial that followed it--a trial that was a cause célèbre in the 1880s and that has since been recognized as one of the most unjust in the annals of American jurisprudence. Paul Avrich shows how eight anarchists who were blamed for the bombing at a workers'' meeting near Chicago''s Haymarket Square became the focus of a variety of passionately waged struggles.

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 abridged edition contains fifty-three interviews conducted by Avrich over a period of thirty 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.

“An American Anarchist closes a major gap in our understanding of American an- archism and particularly a gap in our understanding of its deep roots in American radicalism. It makes the same contribution to our understanding of American feminism.” —Richard Drinnon, author of Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman

"Paul Avrich''s book is very well researched—it fascinated me as I am sure it will fascinate many other people who are interested in the anarchist personality." —George Woodcock

An American Anarchist marked the trail historians of American anarchism are still following today: above all else, to understand anarchists as human beings. Narrative-driven like all of Paul Avrich’s works, this story highlights famous characters like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and the infamous, like Dyer D. Lum—Voltairine de Cleyre’s lover and the man who sneaked a dynamite cartridge into Louis Lingg’s cell so the accused Haymarket Martyr could die at his own hand and not the state’s. De Cleyre (1866–1912), born in Michigan, is noted as the first prominent American-born anarchist. From her voluminous writings and speeches, the illnesses that plagued her, the shooting on a streetcar in Philadelphia that left de Cleyre clinging for life, to her eventual death at forty- five in Chicago, she worked tirelessly for her ideal.