Memorie Autobiografiche [Autobiographical Memoirs]. Transl. by Luigi Galleani. New York: A. Salsedo, 1929.

Memorie Autobiografiche [Autobiographical Memoirs]. Transl. by Luigi Galleani. New York: A. Salsedo, 1929.

This is a translation from the French of the autobiography of Clement Duval, a French anarchist and thief, whose sentence upon conviction was commuted from death to imprisonment in French Guyana, but escaped and made his way to New York, remaining there for the rest of his life, shletered by Galleanists.

His story was recounted in Papillon, a popular work which, shorn of Duval's politics, was made into a successful film. Luigi Galleani translated the work from the French. This copy belonged to O[svaldo] Maranghia, who wrote his name as owner on the front free endpaper; he was an editor of L'Adunata dei Refrattari.

This was intended to be the first volume in a series, but Salsedo only produced one volume. A complete edition did not appear until more than a decade later.

The publisher, Andrea Salsedo, was a Sicilian immigrant, part of Galleani's group with Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1920 he was arrested by the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation (as the FBI was then called) on suspicion of involvement in a bombing conspiracy. He was interrogated, incommunicado, for weeks on an upper floor at 15 Park Row in New York.

On May 3, 1920 he plummeted from the window to the street below. Some accused the authorities of "suiciding" him; an alternate theory is that under torture he eventually surrendered the names of his accomplices, and out of shame, he leaped to his death voluntarily. Only days after his death Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested.

Clemente Duval

A. Salsedo, ed.

22 x 15cm; 203 p.