Hope In The Dark: The Untold History of People Power

American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power began as an online essay that went viral in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Iraq in March 2003. The book was published in mid-2004 and gained an “instant cult following” (Solnit). It has since become a staple text for activists, and new editions were issued in 2006 and 2016.

The original 2004 edition had modest critical success. In 2005, Guardian reviewer and Green Party leader Caroline Lucas praised Hope in the Dark for helping remind people of the good that activism can achieve but criticized Solnit’s scholastic rigor. The book gained renewed popularity after the 2016 election of Donald Trump when New York Times journalist Alice Gregory linked to a download of the book on Facebook. The resurgent popularity of Solnit’s book proves her own argument in Hope in the Dark that writing is an “act of faith” (64) because writers can’t be sure of how and when their words will land.

This study guide uses the Kindle e-book edition published by Canongate Books in 2016. The foreword for this edition doesn’t include page numbers, so citations from the foreword reference an e-book location number instead.