Nicola Saccho and Bar tolomeo Vanzetti, both Italian-born anarchists living and working in the US, were arrested in 1920 after a Massachusetts armed robbery in which two men were shot dead. Almost certainly they were innocent, but America was in the grip of one of its periodic "Red" scares, and they strengthened the case against them by lying initially after their arrest - mainly out of fear.
Their trial was one of the most celebrated in American history, dragging on in appeals and legal haggling, but in the end both men went to the electric chair in 1927. Liberals and leftists fought to clear their name, and it was as part of this campaign that these letters were published, apparently after a good deal of editing - neither Saccho nor Vanzetti knew English very well. The letters themselves are simple, dignified, sometimes poignant, and full of the utopian rhetoric of anarchism. Probably the finest monument to these twin victims of an obvious miscarriage of justice is the series of paintings done by Ben Shahn, who is not mentioned even in passing.