Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. During World War II Fanon enlisted in the French army and was initially sent with allied forces to Casablanca, Morocco, yet was transferred to France where he fought and was wounded in the battle at Colmar, in northern France. After the war Fanon studied medicine in France, where he specialized in psychiatry. It was while studying in France that Fanon wrote his first book, entitled Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a study of the black subjugation in the western white world.

Sent to a hospital in Algeria, he found his sympathies turning toward the Algerian Nationalist Movement, which he later joined. He is considered this century’s most important theorist of the African struggle for independence. The Wretched of the Earth, his most internationally acclaimed book, has been translated into over twenty-five languages, with more than one million copies in print in English alone. Other works by Frantz Fanon available from Grove Press are Black Skin, White Masks; Toward the African Revolution; and A Dying Colonialism.