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. 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, WI.

“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