Work · Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.)
Living My Life
Autobiography from her emigration in 1885 to the years after her deportation, including the break with the Bolsheviks.
Introduction
Goldman wrote her autobiography in exile, largely in Saint-Tropez from 1928, after her deportation from the United States to Soviet Russia in 1919 and her departure from there at the end of 1921. The two volumes, together more than 900 pages, run from her arrival in Rochester, New York, in 1885 through anarchist politics in New York, her partnership with Alexander Berkman and his attempt on the life of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892, lecture tours, prison terms and campaigns for free speech and birth control, to her disillusionment with Bolshevik rule after the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising. The book is also frank about her love life. It is a major source for the history of American anarchism.
Read the full text
Free full text, often an older edition or translation
More works by Emma Goldman
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made