Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Writing Labor’s Emancipation: The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox, by Greg Hall Writing Labor’s Emancipation: The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox. By Greg Hall. (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2022. 276 pp.) Gigi Peterson Gigi Peterson State University of New York at Cortland Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 302–303. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.302 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gigi Peterson; Review: Writing Labor’s Emancipation: The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox, by Greg Hall. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 302–303. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.302 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search Writing for leftwing publications, Jay Fox sometimes created fictional characters to humanize and articulate questions and issues that working people faced. Attentive to this literary strategy, Greg Hall artfully employs a real-life character—Fox—to illustrate conditions and choices as capitalist industrialization transformed labor and lives, and “wageworkers confronted class in American society” (p. 8). Fox chose anarchism to inform his work in this confrontation, as a wage laborer, union organizer, author, and editor. He participated in and wrote about many pivotal developments in U.S. labor history from the late 1880s through the 1930s. Praising Fox’s ability to make “complex ideas and events” (p. 3) accessible to readers, Hall does the same in this “microhistory of the radicals, utopians, revolutionaries, and union men and women with whom [Fox] associated, debated, and supported” (p. 8) during his long life from 1870 to 1961. Some associates were famous, from Emma Goldman to William Z.... You do not currently have access to this content.