C.L.R. James

Kent Worcester is a program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He has written extensively on the life and work of C. L. R. James, and is co-editor of Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s-1990s. He serves on the editorial board of New Politics, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

"This biography is an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to understand the extraordinary life and work of C. L. R. James. It is thoroughly researched, based on primary sources as well as a very wide range of secondary materials, and a careful, subtle reading of James'prolific writings; yet it is always readable. It provides an accessible entry to the many worlds enriched by James: Marxist theory and practice, Caribbean and African politics, Western literature, popular culture, cricket and world revolution. Worcester has written a sensitive, multi-facted, intellectual biography of one of this century's most creative thinkers." — Bridget Brereton, The University of the West Indies"C. L. R. James was one of the twentieth-century's most significant radical intellectuals. Kent Worcester's excellent biography provides an extraordinary analysis of James'screative mind and political imagination. Worcester's work is the single best study of James currently available." — Manning Marable, Columbia University"Kent Worcester has managed to do something that very few people who write about political theory have done. He has provided an eminently readable biography but has also given James his full due as a political, social, and literary theorist. This is a remarkable achievement." — Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York Graduate Center"Kent Worcester's biography puts the gist of James's career before the reader in one compact yet wide-ranging volume....The narrative is swift, yet rich in information. An invaluable guide to the work of a thinker who posed questions about 'postcoloniality' well before his contemporaries realized that all empires must fall." — Scott McLemee, editor, C. L. R. James on the "Negro Question""This is a fine piece of work—a work which has been impatiently awaited for several years by serious 'James scholars.' " — Paul Le Blanc, Carlow College

• Acknowledgments Introduction Part One Chapter One Beyond a Boundary Chapter Two Modern Politics Part Two Chapter Three Education, Propaganda, Agitation Chapter Four Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways Chapter Five Facing Reality Part Three Chapter Six Parties and Politics in the West Indies Chapter Seven At the Rendezvous Appendix I Abbreviations Appendix II Glossary of Names Appendix III Selected and Annotated Bibliography of the Secondary Literature Notes Index