Passionate and enormously talented, Paul Robeson lived one of the great lives of the twentieth century. Martin Duberman's classic biography, <I>Paul Robeson</I>, draws on a vast archive of family papers, interviews, and FBI files to chart the 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; from his political awakening to his downfall as a victim of McCarthyism and the efforts of the U.S. government to destroy him. In a book The Nation hailed as "[ranking] among the finest biographies of any twentieth-century American figure," <I>Paul Robeson</I> is a monumental and powerfully affecting portrait of one of this century's most notable performers, political radicals, and champions of racial equality.