C.L.R. James

A new edition of C.L.R. James’s authorized biography

C.L.R. James was a man of prodigious and varied accomplishments. He was a protean twentieth-century Marxist intellectual, widely recognized as a pioneering scholar of slave revolt; a leading voice of Pan-Africanism; a peripatetic revolutionary and scholar active in US and UK radical movements; a novelist, playwright, and critic; and one of the premier writers on cricket and sports. This intellectual portrait was written by James’s longtime interlocutor and comrade Paul Buhle, and initially published in 1988.

With a new final chapter, updated bibliography, a new foreword by historian Robin D.G. Kelley and a new afterword by Paul Buhle and the philosopher Lawrence Ware, this long-awaited revised edition of a classic biography will be a key resource in the James revival.

“Buhle’s path-breaking work—attentive and scrupulous—is a major contribution … A first-rate analysis of James’s central achievements.”
—Edward Said

“For Buhle, James was many things: artist, revolutionary, athlete, nationalist, internationalist, Anglophile, Graecophile, libertarian, Leninist, Black liberationist, Pan-Africanist, classicist and lover of popular culture. The central achievement of Buhle’s biography of James is that he shows that James did not connect his various roles with the word ‘nevertheless.’ Rather he saw himself as an artist and therefore a revolutionary; as a nationalist and therefore a Pan-Africanist.”
—David Roediger

“I thought it a good book, and a hard book to write, a biography. I haven’t killed anybody, but he made it interesting … A successful piece of work.”
—C.L.R. James

Paul Buhle is the author or editor of more than three-dozen books. Formerly a Senior Lecturer at Brown University, he produces radical comics today. He founded the SDS Journal Radical America and the archive Oral History of the American Left and, with Mari Jo Buhle, is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor of US History at UCLA. His books include Africa Speaks, America Answers!: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.

Lawrence Ware is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Oklahoma State University.