Voltairine de Cleyre

Night in a prison cell! A chair, a bed, a small washstand, four blank walls, ghastly in the dim light from the corridor without, a narrow window, barred and sunken in the stone, a grated door! Beyond its hideous iron latticework, within the ghastly walls,—a man! An old man, gray-haired and wrinkled, lame and suffering. There he sits, in his great loneliness, shut in from all the earth.

In the long sweep of seventeen hundred years which witnessed the engulfment of a moribund Roman civilization, together with its borrowed Greek ideals, under the red tide of a passionate barbarism that leaped to embrace the idea of Triumph over Death, and spat upon the Grecian Joys of Life with the superb contempt of the Norse savage, there was, for Europe and America, but one great animating Word in Art and Literature—Christianity.

Preface by Candace Falk Acknowledgments Part I: Biographical Essays: Three Views of Voltairine de Cleyre "Priestess of Pity and Vengeance" by Crispin Sartwell "The Exquisite Rebel: The Anarchist Life of Voltairine de Cleyre" by Sharon Presley "Emma Goldman's 'Voltairine de Cleyre': A Moving but Flawed Tribute" by Sharon Presley "Voltairine de Cleyre" by Emma Goldman Part II: Loving Freedom: Anarchism Without Adjectives Introduction by Sharon Presley "Why I am an Anarchist" "Anarchism" "Events...