Living My Life

Living My Life is the autobiography of Lithuanian-born anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman (1869-1940), who became one of the best-known radical activists in the United States. It was published in two volumes, first in 1931 by Alfred A. Knopf and then in 1934 by Garden City Publishing Company. Goldman wrote it in Saint-Tropez, France, after she had become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution because of Bolshevik influence. Running to nearly a thousand pages, the book traces her personal and political life in detail from early childhood to 1927, and it has remained in print in both full and abridged editions. Because it appeared nine years before her death, it does not cover her role in the Spanish Civil War.

Goldman was born in 1869 in Kovno, in the Russian Empire, into a family that was poor despite running a small inn. As a child she moved between Lithuania, Prussia and St. Petersburg, and her early years were unhappy, marked by her father's abuse, though she grew close to her older half-sister Helena. In 1885 she emigrated to Rochester, New York, partly to escape an arranged marriage. After a brief and unhappy marriage, she moved to New York City following the execution of the men convicted in the Haymarket case, and there she became one of the country's most prominent anarchists.

The book does not follow a strictly chronological order. Goldman begins in 1889, the year she says her life as an anarchist began, and treats her first twenty years as a kind of earlier existence that helps explain her convictions. She recounts her apprenticeship under the German anarchist Johann Most, her first public lectures, her relationship with Alexander Berkman, and the failed attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead strike, for which Berkman was imprisoned. She also describes her own imprisonment, her travels in Europe, and her arrest, though she was later released, in connection with the assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgosz.

The work is also a passionate defence of free love, women's emancipation, opposition to industrial labour, and a critique of political repression in America. Its legacy has been lasting: it is widely regarded as one of the fullest records of early twentieth-century American anarchism and of the life of a woman who defied the conventions of her time.