Born in Trinidad in 1901, C. L. R. James moved to England in 1932 where he was a leading Marxist theorist, a founder of the Pan-African movement, cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and author of numerous books, including the influential history of the Haitian slave rebellion, The Black Jacobins (1938). From 1938 to 1953 he lived in the United States, where he wrote, lectured, and organized for the Socialist Worker's Party and was a leader of the Trotskyite sect the "Johnson-Forest Tendency." Arrested for "passport violations," James was confined on Ellis Island, where he wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953). Deported from the United States, James spent the rest of his life in England and in Trinidad. His last great book, Beyond a Boundary (1963), combined cricket with cultural and political criticism. Donald E. Pease, Avalon Professor of Humanities, Dartmouth College, author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (1987), editor (with Amy Kaplan) of Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), and editor of the Duke University Press series The New Americanists, provides a lengthy introduction to this book and its history.
[An] amalgam of brilliant critical analysis and desperate personal pleading . . . The publication of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways by the University Press of New England this summer the first time the book has been printed in complete form in nearly 50 years is simply the latest evidence of a major James revival now under way . . . [James s] posthumous popularity makes sense. Just as he argued that Melville s novel is alive today as never before since it was written, James s work from more than 50 years ago neatly prefigured an impressive number of contemporary academic trends. The New York Times"
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