Drinnon, Richard. Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. First published by University of Chicago Press, 1961. 349 pp.



pdf, scanned



Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 - May 14, 1940) was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.



During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest.  -- wikipedia



from the back cover:



"Here is a superb story that will shock the staid [and] antagonize the closed-minded, since it reveals an Emma Goldman who was not a political lunatic but a remarkable woman of many facets--popularizer of the arts, defender of civil liberties, caustic critic of dictatorship, strong proponent of birth control, and, above all, a sensitive human being." -- Robert K. Murray, Mississippi Valley Historical Review



"Mr. Drinnon persuades us that Emma Goldman's life was worth living for its own sake. Her exuberant and overpowering vitality, her courage and audacity in defending the individual against the State, even her notorious series of love affairs, in which she combined sexual energy with compassion and sympathy, made [Goldman] ... one of the great women of her age." -- Goronwy Rees, The Sunday Times



"An extremely readable and well-done biography, one that is strangely moving somehow -- not just because of the life of the heroine but because of the richly flavorsome volatility of the life [Drinnon] reveals in a strange era." -- Donald Meyer, Frontier