C.L.R. James

Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989), who sometimes wrote under the pen name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, and Marxist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles. In 1938 he wrote about the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.

Characterized by one literary critic as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician," James was known for his autodidactism, for his occasional playwriting, and fiction – his 1936 book Minty Alley was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in Britain – and as an avid sportsman. He is also famed as a writer on cricket, and his 1963 book Beyond a Boundary, which he himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography," is commonly named the best single book on cricket and even the best book about sports ever written.

Born in 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad, then a British Crown colony, C. L. R. James was the first child of Ida Elizabeth James (née Rudder)[8] and Robert Alexander James, a schoolteacher. In 1910, James won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College (QRC), the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school, in Port of Spain, where he became a club cricketer and distinguished himself as an athlete (he would hold the Trinidad high-jump record at 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) from 1918 to 1922), as well as beginning to write fiction. 

After graduating in 1918 from QRC, he worked there as a teacher of English and History in the 1920s; among those he taught was the young Eric Williams, who would become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes, and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anticolonialist "Beacon Group," a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine, in which he published a series of short stories. His short story "La Divina Pastora" was published in October 1927 in the Saturday Review of Literature and was widely reprinted.

James married his first wife, Juanita Young, in Trinidad in 1929, but his move three years later to Britain led to their estrangement. He met his second wife, Constance Webb (1918–2005), an American model, actress, and author after he moved to the US in 1938; she wrote of having first heard him speak in the spring of 1939 at a meeting in California. James and Webb married in 1946, and their son, C. L. R. James Jr, familiarly known as Nobbie, was born in 1949. 

Separated forcibly in 1952 by James's arrest and detention on Ellis Island, the couple divorced in 1953, when James was deported to Britain, while Webb remained in New York with Nobbie. A collection of James's letters to Webb was posthumously published as Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939–1948, edited and introduced by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). 

Stories written by James for his son were published in 2006 as The Nobbie Stories for Children and Adults, edited and introduced by Constance Webb. In 1956 James married Selma Weinstein (née Deitch), who had been a young member of the Johnson–Forest Tendency; they remained close political colleagues for more than 25 years but divorced in 1980. She is best known as one of the founders of the International Wages for Housework Campaign.