Named a best book of 2024 so far by The New York Times | The New Yorker | Vulture

Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

Nimble and engrossing . . . [An] exemplary work of public intellectualism. Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

“Undoubtedly the best [biography of Fanon] . . . A remarkable achievement.” Robert J. C. Young, Los Angeles Review of Books

A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired todays movements for social and racial justice.

In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanons shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanons stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold Warera thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of dis-alienation in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.

Today, Fanons Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwins essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebels Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanons extraordinary lifeand a guide to the books that underlie todays most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs