![]() ![]() In an interview, Avrich said de Cleyre was “a fascinating person. Her writings carry the entire range of human experience-curiosity and profound wonder in her earlier years, then more sorrow and bitterness as she grew older. ![]() In contemporary descriptions, Voltairine de Cleyre is striking for her intellectual powers, her intense empathy and love for suffering people and animals, and her particular charisma. ![]() ![]() Cohen, editor Abraham Isaak, or the almost completely forgotten poet-essayist Viroqua Daniels. Avrich’s books are as readable as novels, and de Cleyre’s life is what you’re about to discover.ĭe Cleyre remains today one of the most inspiring of all the early-American anarchists, including the notorious few, such as Emma Goldman or Johann Most, and the less known but equally remarkable, like educator Joseph J. No one, living or dead, could introduce her as well as Paul Avrich does with this biography, which is as inspiring to readers as Emma Goldman’s Living My Life or Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. De Cleyre pressed her cause when anyone else would have dropped the activism due to poverty and sickness. Because I relished Avrich’s writing already, because I had the enthusiasm of a recent convert to anarchist thinking, I could hardly wait to read de Cleyre’s biography.Īvrich presented to his readers the depth and intensity of this intellectual powerhouse who repeatedly made sacrifices and endangered herself in order to stay true to her principles, which she never once compromised for her own safety’s sake. I knew de Cleyre only as a figure mentioned in Avrich’s later book The Haymarket Tragedy. In 1990, I walked into a tiny anarchist bookstore and found a rare copy of An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre by Paul Avrich. Foreword to the 40th Anniversary Edition of An American Anarchist ![]()
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