C.L.R. James was born in Trinidad in 1918. At the age of twelve he moved with his family to British Guiana where they lived for almost a decade. In 1937, James became a lecturer at the University College of the West Indies and attended the London School of Economics, where he earned a Ph.D
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in Political Science. He was a lecturer at several universities in England and Canada, and a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1966, James was exiled from Trinidad by Prime Minister Eric Williams.
In 1967 he won the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union for his work as chairman of the Pan-African Congress and editor of its journal, The World Crisis. In 1970 he received the American Book Award for his autobiography My Life: A Record Of Struggle And Triumph (1969).