Letters from London

Letters from London collects these essays for the first time in seventy years, offering an essential record of a crucial period in James's life. As the education and manners of his colonial upbringing are tested in the heady atmosphere of cosmopolitan London, we sense the emergence of the revolutionary thinker who was to become a major intellectual figure not just of the West Indies but of the world.

In 1932, C.L.R. James left his home in Trinidad for the first time and sailed to the United Kingdom to fulfill his literary ambitions. He was thirty-one years old. During his first weeks in London he wrote a series of vigorously opinionated essays for the Port of Spain Gazette, giving his impressions of the great city and its inhabitants, and describing his progress through the Bohemian circles of Bloomsbury.

Letters from London collects these essays for the first time in seventy years, offering an essential record of a crucial period in James's life. As the education and manners of his colonial upbringing are tested in the heady atmosphere of cosmopolitan London, we sense the emergence of the revolutionary thinker who was to become a major intellectual figure not just of the West Indies but of the world.

Historian of revolution, Marxist philosopher, novelist, activist, and critic, C.L.R. JAMES (1901-1989), was a major intellectual figure of the twentieth century. Born in Trinidad, he spent most of his life outside the Caribbean, working with various revolutionary movements in Britain and the United States. His classic works include American Civilization, Beyond a Boundary, and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, recently published by UPNE for the first time in its complete form since its original appearance.