Discover the Best Books Written by Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon (/ˈfænən/, US: /fæˈnɒ̃/;[3] French: [fʁɑ̃ts fanɔ̃]; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist, and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria's War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time." For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organizations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States.

He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental-health patients would do better if they were integrated into their families and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.

Fanon published numerous books, including The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This influential work focuses on what he believed is the necessary role of violence by activists in conducting decolonization struggles.

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony and now a French single territorial collectivity. His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, was a descendant of African slaves and worked as a customs agent. His mother, Eléanore Médélice, was of Afro-Martinican and white Alsatian descent and worked as a shopkeeper. Frantz was the third of four sons in a family of eight children. Two of them died young, including his sister Gabrielle, with whom Frantz was very close. 

His family was socio-economically middle-class. They could afford the fees for the Lycée Schoelcher, at the time the most prestigious high school in Martinique, where Fanon came to admire one of the school's teachers, poet, and writer Aimé Césaire. Fanon left Martinique in 1943, when he was 18 years old, in order to join the Free French forces.