C. L. R. James was born in Trinidad in 1901 and moved to England in 1932. He was a leading Marxist theorist, a founder of the Pan-African movement, a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and the author of numerous books, including the influential history of the Haitian slave rebellion, The Black Jacobins. From 1938 to 1953 he lived in the United States, where he wrote, lectured, and organized for the Socialist Worker's Party and cofounded the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a Marxist group. Arrested for "passport violations," James was confined on Ellis Island, where he wrote Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. Deported from the United States, he spent the rest of his life in England and Trinidad.
