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Dennis Dalton is a professor of political science at Barnard College.
`I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful radiant things." That is what anarchism meant to Emma Goldman, the Jewish immigrant from Russia who emerged, at the turn of the last century, as America's most notorious anarchist and feminist. Goldman, who was deported back to Russia in 1919, became a major figure in American political and social history, a subject of both controversy and ardor, and a great advocate of joy as the central truth whose life was essentially tragic.
No one has made a better case for Goldman's lasting significance, in both her theory and practice, than Candace Falk, first in her definitive biography, "Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman" (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), and now with the publication of the first of four volumes of writings by and about Goldman. Edited with the assistance of Barry Pateman and several other scholars at the Emma Goldman Papers Project at University of California at Berkeley, the team's commitment to scholarship is impressive and inspiring. As this initial volume in the series demonstrates, they have managed to retrieve and assemble with admirable editorial skill an unprecedented array of Goldman materials: personal correspondence, newspaper articles, government surveillance reports from the United States and Europe, court transcripts, unpublished lecture notes and related documentation of her life and thought, all helpfully annotated or enhanced by Falk's 84-page introduction. In addition, chronologies, brief biographical sketches of relevant figures and other information make this volume alone indispensable for understanding Goldman.
The picture painted by the collection of these artifacts is...