In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, anarchist, and lover of Emma
Goldman, attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The
act was intended both as retribution for the massacre of workers in the
Homestead strike and as an incitement to revolution. Captured and
sentenced to serve a prison term of twenty-two years, Berkman struggled
to make sense of the shadowy and brutalized world of the prison--one
that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.