Karl Marx – His life and Thought

The 1st edition of David McLellan’s Karl Marx: His Life & Thought was published in 1973. For the 4th edition McLellan updated the detailed footnotes at the end of each chapter, as well as the extensive annotated bibliography at the end.
McLellan’s biography has stood the test of time. Despite the much-publicised & over-hyped publication of Francis Wheen’s biography of Marx in 1999, McLellan’s book remains by far the best biography of Marx in English. Unlike Wheen, McLellan has an encyclopedic knowledge of Marx’s publications & pulls off the feat of interweaving exposition of his works with a detailed & sympathetic account of his public & private life.
McLellan’s biography also compares well to some of the classic biographies. Franz Mehring’s Karl Marx: The Story of His Life is still worth a read, especially for the clear chapter on the 2nd & 3rd volumes of Capital, which Mehring tells us was written as a favor to Rosa Luxemburg. However, Mehring’s book was written in 1918, predating the publication in the 1930s of such works as the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 & the Grundrisse of 1857-8, as well as much correspondence.
Boris Nicolaievsky & Otto Maenchen-Helfen’s Karl Marx: Man & Fighter, completed under Hitler’s shadow in Berlin in 1933 but not published until 1936, is another classic. However, as the authors make clear in their foreword, it doesn’t aspire to be a full intellectual biography, but concentrates primarily on his political activity, especially around the periods of the 1848 revolutions & the years of the 1st International from the mid-1860s to early 1870s.
McLellan’s book thus remains the best, most up-to-date biography of Marx covering the full range of his activities, both practical & intellectual. Readers leave McLellan’s volume with an appetite to read Marx’s works for themselves–the best sign of success in an intellectual biography.
However, the volume is more than simply an intellectual biography. McLellan seamlessly integrates hi