Louise Cripps Samoiloff: A life seeking justice in all its colours

This book introduces the remarkable life and work of Louise Cripps Samoiloff (1904-2001), an English born writer, journalist, publisher, historian and socialist who became an American citizen and was the author of over a dozen books, many of which articulated the case for the independence of Puerto Rico. It explores her political evolution, writings and activism, and how it was shaped by her relationship with the black Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, author of The Black Jacobins, who she first met in the summer of 1934 while they were both members of the tiny British Trotskyist movement. As she was to write later of her ‘close association’ with C.L.R. James, ‘I, a young bourgeois woman whose aims, until then, had been to be a first-class literary writer, was pushed into a revolutionary ambiance. But it was an experience that for me, too, would colour my political perspective for a lifetime. When I started writing my own books at last, they were written from the perspective of those views I had learned in James’s London group [of Trotskyists]. They were about the Caribbean, but about Puerto Rico and the Spanish Caribbean. They were written mostly from a political viewpoint, not a literary one.’