Labor Agitator: the Story of Albert R. Parsons

New York: International Publishers, 1937. First Edition. First printing. Octavo (20cm); pictorial card wrappers, 126pp; illus. Mild soild and age-darkening to covers, with diagonal crease to rear wrapper, else a tight, Very Good copy. Ink ex-libris of Pittsburgh writer and activist J. Ernest Wright (see note), who has also made a few inobtrusive marks in the text.

A sympathetic biography of Albert Parsons and the Haymarket Martyrs, written by a communist fellow-traveler and published by the New York division of the Comintern-backed International Publishers. A classic Popular Front example of the CPUSA appropriating a key historical figure - in this case, an anarchist - whose political views would have been considered irreconcilable with Marxism just a few years earlier (and would again by the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939). Includes a glowing foreword by Lucy E. Parsons, who by this time was well into her eighties, and five illustrations after original lithographs by Mitchell Siporin. This copy with ownership markings of Pittsburgh labor activist and author J. Ernest Wright, director of Pittsburgh's New Theatre and author of an important history of the city's African American community, which wasn't actually published until near fifty years after the author's death (The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).