Cultural Writing. ANARCHIST VOICES contains 180 interviews conducted over a period of 30 years. The interviewees were active between the 1880s and 1930s and represent all schools of anarchism. Each of the 6 thematic sections begins with an explanatory essay, and each interview with a biographical note. Their stories provide a wealth of personal detail about such anarchist luminaries as Emma Goldman and Sacco and Vanzetti. This work of impeccable scholarship is an invaluable resource not only for scholars of anarchism but also for those studying immigration, ethnic politics, education and labor history. Paul Avrich is a professor of history at Queens College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

Paul Avrich (August 4, 1931 - February 16, 2006) was a professor and historian. He taught at Queens College, New York for most of his life and was vital in preserving the history of the anarchist movement in Russia and the United States. As the son of a Jewish family, originally from Odessa, Avrich was able to travel to the USSR as an exchange student in 1961 after Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 US visit. While there working on his thesis, The Russian Revolution and the Factory Committees, he researched the Kronstadt rebellion and the role of anarchists in the Russian Revolution. This information allowed him to produce pioneering and important works on this subject. As a teacher at Queens College, he sought to pass to his students an "affection and sense of solidarity with anarchists as people, rather than as militants" and was described as a "trusted friend" to many older anarchists whom he had met and interviewed, saving their stories for history. He wrote extensively on topics related to anarchism, including books on Sacco and Vanzetti, the Haymarket Riot, and the Kronstadt rebellion. Other important works include a biography of Voltairine de Cleyre, The Modern School Movement and Anarchist Portraits. He also edited the important oral history collection, Anarchist Voices. He was nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize for History. He also spoke regularly at the Libertarian Book Club in New York. Avrich donated his collection of nearly 20,000 twentieth-century American and European anarchist publications and manuscripts to the Library of Congress.