An American in the Making, the Life Story of an Immigrant: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

An American in the Making, the Life Story of an Immigrant, credited to Marcus Eli Ravage, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of An American in the Making, the Life Story of an Immigrant by Marcus Eli Ravage. Read in English by Sue Anderson “The sweat-shop was for me the cradle of liberty. . . It was my first university.” Attending lectures and the New York theatre at night; by day sewing sleeves into shirts in a ghetto shop, Marcus Eli Ravage (1884-1965) began his transformation from “alien” to American. His 1917 autobiography is a paean to the transformative power of education. Ravage emigrated from Rumania in 1900, at the age of 16. After working for several years as a “sleever” to save money, he enrolls in the University of Missouri (the least expensive school he can find), where culture shock overwhelms him at first. “I was not sure whether it was a pig or a sheep that bleated, whether clover was a plant and plover a bird, or the other way around.” But he adapts, and eventually embraces “the bigger and freer world” outside the immigrant ghetto. He writes that, because of his university experience, he was no longer “a man without a country.” He had become an American. - Summary by Sue Anderson

Recording facts

• Recording title: An American in the Making, the Life Story of an Immigrant
• Author credits: Marcus Eli Ravage
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 22
• Listed recording duration: 8:41:13

Catalogue topics

• emigration
• rumania
• sweat-shops
• univesity of missouri

Track guide

1. 00 - Introduction — 8:41
2. 01 - The Prophet from America — 24:49
3. 02 - The Gospel of New York — 24:33
4. 03 - The Exodus — 13:43
5. 04 - To America on Foot — 22:49
6. 05 - Farewell Forever — 20:32
7. 06 - First Impressions — 20:12
8. 07 - The Immigrant's America — 17:30
9. 08 - — 26:59
10. 09 - Ventures and Adventures — 39:45
11. 10 - Purifications — 26:03
12. 11 - The Ethics of the Bar — 22:33
13. 12 - Shirts and Philosophy — 28:32
14. 13 - The Soul of the Ghetto — 18:06
15. 14 - The Tragedy of Readjustment — 25:13
16. 15 - The Trials of Scholarship — 27:36
17. 16 - Off to College — 19:33
18. 17 - In the Mold — 27:16
19. 18 - The American as He Is — 28:02
20. 19 - The Fruits of Solitude — 27:48
21. 20 - Harvey — 29:40
22. 21 - The Romance of Readjustment — 21:18

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.