Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was the author of 'The Wretched Of The Earth', one of the most unsettling books of the 1960s, the decade of revolution and decolonisation. His angry and eloquent writings on race, racism, psychiatry and anti-colonialism made him already celebrated, or notorious, in his lifetime. After his early death, he was transformed into a prophet of the cleansing and liberating effect of violence. Yet in the form of post-colonial studies, his work has now become respectable in the academies of the developed world.
Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in Lyons before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had seen combat as a volunteer in the Free French Army during the liberation of France, and in Algeria came into contact with the Front de Liberation National, with whom he completely identified. He soon became a marked man, forced to flee Algeria, and subsequently worked with the FLN as a propagandist and ambassador.
This complete and objective biography reveals Fanon to be a complex figure, infinitely more interesting than the theorist of anti-colonial violence celebrated by the left in the 1960s. It shows him to have been a man formed by his experiences, and places him sensitively in the context of the French Caribbean, with its history of slavery and racism. The book traces Fanon's intellectual career as a political thinker and psychiatrist with great care, setting it against the background of post-war French culture. Fanon's Algerian phase and the writings that came out of it were inevitably overshadowed by the harrowing violence of a terrible war.
