I slipped into the world while my mother was on her knees scrubbing the floor. So begins inauspiciously on July 18, 1879, the life--and the unfinished autobiography--of Rose Pastor Stokes. An East European Jewish immigrant, Stokes became a member of the American Socialist party, a founding member of the American Communist party, and such an outspoken critic of U.S. policies that she was convicted of seditious activities during World War I. Indeed, Stokes was one of the most deeply committed American radicals in the first decades of this century. In a lengthy introduction the editors provide a detailed outline of Stokes's life. As a young girl living in the slums of Cleveland, she helped support her family with earnings from her job at a cigar factory. There, Stokes came in contact for the first time with socialism and the hope of a better and more equitable world. Eventually leaving the cigar factory for a job in New York at the Jewish Daily News, she met and married James Graham Phe