Martyrs of the Early American Left: Inez Mulholland, Randolph Bourne, and John Reed, by Robert C. Cottrell. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2023. 301 pages, bibl., index, 9781476691497, $55.00 (ppbk).

Robert C. Cottrell has produced a well-written and researched biography of three notable early twentieth century American left activists. Reed will be familiar to many readers for his coverage of the Mexican and Russian revolutions, but Cottrell points out that Mulholland and Bourne have been nearly forgotten as independent-minded, influential journalist/activists of that same period. Cottrell argues that all three cultural radicals “exemplified the Lyrical Left’s dogged commitment to socialism, feminism, labor rights, internationalism, and, perhaps most of all, individualism (3).” Not directly connected to each other, they shared privileged backgrounds, movement from academia to the organized left, and all died in their early thirties. Cottrell characterizes these premature deaths as martyrdom. The deaths of Mulholland in 1916 (“‘aplastic anemia’…coupled with pleurisy (165)”) and Reed in 1920 (typhus) resulted from their fatal disregard for their health in relentlessly traveling to promote, respectively, women’s suffrage and communism, while Bourne, with his own lifelong health issues, was a casualty of the 1918 global flu pandemic. Twenty-one chapters move forward chronologically with ample details of their personal lives amid a background of revolutions, world war, social upheaval, and cultural ferment.Summing up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. Reviewer: P.F. Rubio, North Carolina A&T State University.