Passionate and enormously talented, Paul Robeson lived one of the great lives of the twentieth century. Martin Duberman's classic biography is a monumental and powerfully affecting portrait of one of this century's most notable performers, political radicals, and champions of racial equality. Drawing on a vast archive of family papers and interviews with friends and relatives, as well as FBI files, Paul Robeson charts the heroic and tragic course of Robeson's life: from his early days as the son of a former slave to his rise to unprecedented international acclaim as a stage actor and singer, and from his political awakening to his downfall as a victim of McCarthyism and the efforts of the U.S. government to destroy him. Book jacket.