Living My Life is the autobiography of Lithuanian-born anarchist Emma Goldman, who became internationally renowned as an activist based in the United States. It was published in two volumes in 1931 (Alfred A. Knopf) and 1934 (Garden City Publishing Company). Goldman wrote it while living in Saint-Tropez, France, following her disillusionment with the Bolshevik role in the Russian revolution. The text thoroughly covers her personal and political life from early childhood through to 1927. The book has constantly remained in print since, in original and abridged editions. Since the autobiography was published nine years before Goldman died in 1940, it does not record her role in the Spanish Civil War. Background Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in Kovno, Lithuania (then Russian Empire). Her parents Abraham and Taube owned a modest inn but were generally impoverished. Throughout her childhood and early adolescence, Goldman traveled between her parents' home in Lithuania and her grandmother's home in Königsberg, Prussia before the family relocated to St. Petersburg. Though much of her childhood was unhappy, as her father was often abusive, Goldman was close with her older half-sister Helena and valued the modest schooling she received. In 1885, Goldman immigrated with Helena to Rochester, New York to join their sister Lena and escape the influence of her father; he wanted to make an arranged marriage for her. Despite finding work in a clothing factory, Goldman did not stay in Rochester long. Enraged by the execution of the Haymarket bombers in 1887, she moved to New York and became one of the nation's most renowned anarchists. Summary Goldman begins Living My Life with her arrival in New York City on August 8, 1889—the day she said she began her life as an anarchist. She does not express her autobiography chronologically, as she considered her first twenty years to be something of a previous life. As Goldman recalls, "All that had happened in my life until that time was now left behind me, cast off like a worn-out garment." Living My Life reflects upon Goldman's time prior to New York as a means of explaining her principles and conversion to anarchy. For instance, she describes her employment in a Rochester clothing factory as an introduction to her antagonism toward industrial labor. Goldman claimed to work ten and a half hours a day and earned $2.50 a week, not unusual for the time. After she asked the