Living My Life

Anarchist, journalist, drama critic, and 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 she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of Lenin's Bolshevik experiment, and its later disillusionment. Sounding a call still heard today, Living My Life is a riveting account of political ferment and ideological turbulence.