Foster's 352-page memoir has come to be regarded as an important historical source for students of early 20th Century syndicalism and communism in the United States, and has been extensively employed in the writing of several biographies of the author.

[3] In search of a cure, in the summer of 1933 Foster traveled to the Soviet Union, where he was placed in a series of three different health care facilities, with his mental state only deteriorating further, with his daughter bringing him home to the US in January 1934.

[3] Again on the advice of his doctor, Foster was moved out of the Communist Party hub of New York City, this time to the home of a relative in comparatively placid San Francisco, California, located on the opposite coast.

[3] It was during this long recuperation process in 1934 and 1935 that Foster began work on his autobiography, an effort that was ultimately published in two volumes as From Bryan to Stalin (1937) and Pages from a Worker's Life (1939).

[5] After joining the Communist movement, Foster's emphasis becomes one of detailing the "boring from within" process as practiced by the Trade Union Educational League which he headed, Barbash notes.

[5] Barbash is critical of the way that Foster failed to acknowledge the success of Samuel Gompers in establishing trade unions capable of withstanding the pressures of economic depression and his tendency to vilify his opponents as practitioners of "deliberate deception," calling them "ultra-reactionary, misleaders, and betrayers.

"[5] He also upbraids Foster for an inability or unwillingness to admit error in explaining various tactical reversals of the Communists, which were transformed from support of third party Presidential politics in 1924 to a strategy of "defeating Landon at all costs" in the election of 1936.

This relationship was emphasized by CPUSA leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who in her review of From Bryan to Stalin in The New Masses hailed Foster's work the "broad, factual, and impersonal story" of "an American worker and the forces which led him to revolutionary conclusions and finally to the Communist Party.

"[6] The conservative British magazine The Spectator was more sanguine in its appraisal, criticizing Foster's "account of the transformation of the too exotic, too doctrinaire party of zealots into the present officially truly American party that has Moscow's blessing is too brief to be more than a whet to the appetite" while noting that "a great deal of his book...will be unintelligible to the reader who has not the general outlines of recent American labour history clearly in his head.