Aug 13
2010

From Wikipedia:

Cipriano Ricardo Flores Magón (September 16, 1874 — November 21, 1922) was a noted Mexican anarchist and social reform activist. He was born on Mexican Independence Day, in San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca. He died at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, USA…. He was one of the major thinkers of the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican revolutionary movement in the Partido Liberal Mexicano. Flores Magón organised with the Wobblies (IWW) and edited the Mexican anarchist newspaper Regeneración, which aroused the workers against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.

Magón is most famous as an activist and revolutionary, but he also wrote a very short story, The Soldier (online at the Kate Sharpley Library).

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Sep 18
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

Ba Jin (1904–2005) is considered one of the most important figures in Chinese literary history. He was introduced to anarchism at the age of 15 by Kropotkin’s writing and he translated many anarchist works into Chinese for publication by a Shanghai newspaper. He worked on behalf of the struggle to free Sacco & Vanzetti and corresponded with Vanzetti until the Bostonian was executed. His most famous novel, Family, is a work critiquing the Chinese feudal system and promotes the concept of youth in revolt. In the 1950s, perhaps due to fear of persecution, he disavowed the anarchism of his youth, and even went to far as to purge his own works of their anarchistic content. Regardless, he was branded as a counter-revolutionary by the Cultural Revolution and was prevented from writing for years. When the Cultural Revolution passed, he rose in party favor and found himself Chairperson of the Chinese Writer’s Association. In later writings, he alluded to possible resentment of his abandonment of anarchism.

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Sep 18
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923), a Czech whose satirical anti-war novel The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War has been translated into more than 60 languages, was a notorious anarchist and political organizer in Prague. He spent a month in jail for assaulting an officer and he published an anarchist newspaper. In his later life, he shied away from his anarchist leanings and was a member of the Bolshevik Party. At one point, while employed by The Animal Journal, he was fired for writing about imaginary animals as though they were real.

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Sep 18
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

Paul Goodman (1911–1972), was a lot of things to a lot of different people. To the psychotherapy world, he is known as one of the co-founders of Gestalt theory. To the literary world, he was a novelist. Perhaps his most famous novel is The Empire City, a story that follows a ’50s rebel in New York City. But he’s also well known as the author of Growing Up Absurd, and his works were hugely influential on the ’60s student radical movement, a movement he later criticized as sometimes both too dogmatic and too fickle.

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Sep 18
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

William Godwin (1756–1836), considered by some “the first anarchist,” did indeed lay down an impressive amount of anti-state theory, in part in his remarkably titled Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. He also, however, wrote what is considered the first mystery novel: Things as They Are or The Adventures of Caleb Williams. He was married to Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first feminists, and fathered Mary Shelley, one of the first science-fiction authors. He was libeled and persecuted heavily for his political be-liefs and spent much of his life living as anonymously as possible.

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Sep 16
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) was an art and literary critic in turn-of-the-century Paris, the coiner of the term “neo-impressionism,” and openly identified as an anarchist. In 1894, he and 29 others were acquitted of conspiracy to bomb and assassinate political leaders. He wrote Novels in Three Lines, a piece that redefined the idea of story-telling. The book is formed from a series of newspaper headlines that he wrote in 1906 for a paper, but taken together they paint a dark vignette of Parisian life.

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Sep 16
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

Max Ernst (1891–1976) was an active participant in both Dada and Surrealism and was a visual artist who worked in collage, paintings, and sculpture. He was also one of the early creators of wordless novels, such as his Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), a collaged dark piece that follows a bird-man in a dark and surreal world. It wasn’t hard to discover he was politically radical (as most dadaists and surrealists were), but it was from Conversing with Cage, a collection of interviews with anarchist composer John Cage edited by Richard Kostelanetz that I discovered Ernst as an anarchist. In one interview, Cage is talking about his own anarchist influences and mentions, “I said something about anarchy to the widow of Max Ernst and she said that Max was an anarchist.”

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Sep 16
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), raised by a nihilist and anarchist, was a cross-dressing sufi and writer who traveled and wrote extensively throughout northern Africa before dying suddenly in a flash flood at the age of 27. She was accused of assisting indigenous resistance to French occupation, and generally had many strange adventures. She wrote short stories, journalism, and journal entries, most of which survive. Although she became more invested in sufism and Islam than in anarchism proper, I feel it is safe to consider her the anarchist she was raised to be.

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Sep 16
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

Joseph Déjacque (1821–1864), born in France, was the author who coined the term “libertarian” to distinguish anarchists from liberals (in a letter to Proudhon, whom he criticized for opposing feminism). Among other things, he wrote the fictional utopia L’Humanisphère: Utopie anarchique, which includes in its introduction the lines: “This book is not written in ink, and its pages are not sheets of paper … it is a projectile, that I throw thousands of onto the streets of the civilized.” The utopia was first serialized in Le Libertaire, the US’s first anarcho-communist journal. Joseph was exiled from Napeleon’s France for publishing radical poetry, and retreated for a number of years to the US before returning to France and dying in Paris.

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Sep 15
2009

From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:

Voltairine De Cleyre (1866–1912) was a poet and theorist who converted to anarchism in 1887 after the Haymarket trial shattered her faith in the American justice system. She was an early believer in “anarchism without adjectives,” which meant that she didn’t choose to identify specifically with communist, mutaualist, or individualist anarchism. She fought voraciously for the rights of women. The most famous piece of her fiction is “The Chain Gang,” a short story included in The Gates of Freedom.

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