Alexander Berkman, who called himself a "citizen of the world," was an anarchist who published books and articles during the early twentieth century when the American anarchist movement was at its height. Berkman is most remembered by American students for his ill-fated attempt on the life of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Primarily regarded as a popularizer of anarchist thought, Berkman's writings represent a significant synthesis of a particular brand of anarchism that provided points of intersection between anarchism, syndicalism, and socialism. Berkman's writings illuminate in a straightforward style the political dialogue that went on in the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Ovsei (Alexander) Schmidt Berkman was born on 21 November 1870 in Kovno in the Russian Empire, a settlement in the Jewish Pale (a land area set aside by the czarist government specifically for the Jews to live in) near the Polish...