Labor organizer and Marxist politician. Joined the Socialist party in 1901, later became a Wobbly, Syndicalist, and Communist. Three times a presidential candidate of the Communist party.
This book is both an essential history of the CPUSA by a first-hand participant and a sweeping and sophisticated marxist analysis of US history as a whole from the vantage point of 1950. However, I would have preferred for Foster to have gone into more detail on the former topic and less on the latter.