The following book is an autobiography of the author himself: Albert Parsons. He was a pioneering American socialist and later anarchist newspaper editor, orator, and labor activist. As a teenager, he served in the military force of the Confederate States of America in Texas, during the American Civil War. After the war, he settled in Texas, and became an activist for the rights of former slaves, and later a Republican official during Reconstruction. Parsons was one of four Chicago radical leaders controversially convicted of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb attack on police remembered as the Haymarket affair.