In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, anarchist, and lover of Emma Goldman, attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The act was intended as retribution for Frick's part in the massacre of workers in the Homestead strike. Captured and sentenced to serve a prison term of twenty-two years, of which he served 14, Berkman struggled to make sense of the shadowy and brutalized world of the prison—one that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.