Peter Glassgold

In Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, Peter Glassgold brings to the page political activist and anarchist Emma Goldman's most radical contribution, Mother Earth, a monthly journal about social science and literature. Glassgold has compiled Mother Earth's most provocative articles, with thematic categories ranging from "The Woman Question" to "The Social War" and features a diverse selection of writers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Margaret Sanger, Peter Kropotkin, and Alexander Berkman.Mother Earth was published from 1906 to 1918, when birth control, the labor movement, sexual freedom, and the arts where common subjects. The supporters of the journal helped form what was the  radical left" in the United States at the turn of the century. Goldman was imprisoned and ultimately deported to her native Russia. This new edition includes the transcripts from the trial and the summations of both Alexander Berkman and Goldman.With a new preface by the editor, this book offers historical grounding to many of our contemporary political movements, from libertarianism to the Occupy! actions. Anarchy! provides unprecedented access to Goldman's beliefs, offering insight to the political activism that existed at the time.

The long-awaited memoirs of New Directions' founder. James Laughlin, the late founder and publisher of New Directions, was also a poet of elegance and distinction. At his death in 1997 at the age of eighty-three, he left unfinished his long autobiographical poem, Byways. It is no exaggeration to say that his publishing house, which he began in 1936 while still an undergraduate at Harvard, changed the way Americans read and write serious literature. Yet the man who published some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century remained resistant for most of his life to the memoiristic impulse. In the end he found his autobiographical voice by adopting the swift-moving line of Kenneth Rexroth's booklength philosophical poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952). Byways weaves together family history (the Laughlins were wealthy Pittsburgh steel magnates), the poet's early memories and travels in Europe and America with his playboy father, his years at Harvard, first meetings with Pound, the beginning of his publishing venture, his reminiscences of close friendships with writers including W.C. Williams, Thomas Merton, and Kenneth Rexroth, his postwar work in Europe and Asia with the Ford Foundation as publisher of its international literary magazine, Perspectives, and not least, his many early loves.