Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique, a French colony, in 1925. As a young man, he volunteered to fight in De Gualle’s army for the liberation of France, and trained to become a doctor and psychiatrist. His experiences as a black man under French colonial rule had a profound effect on him. In 1952, he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, a powerful analysis of the effects of racism on the human psyche. He was later reassigned to a hospital in French Algeria. It was here that he became involved in the rebellion of the National Liberation Front (FLN), who fought to break free from colonial power, and the draconian response of the French authorities, which included widespread mass killings and the systematic use of torture. Fanon’s work for the FLN as a propagandist and psychiatrist became highly contentious. His final work, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961 just before Fanon died at the age of 36. It has proved to be one of the most controversial and influential books of its time. The Rebel’s Clinic is a searing biography of the short and harrowing life of Frantz Fanon, a man whose legacy is nuanced, disputed, powerful, and in a time where the topics of empire and race have become increasingly pressing, still very much felt today.

Through a close reading of the lives and works of some of the greatest intellectuals of recent times, Adam Shatz asks: do writers have an ethical imperative to question injustice? How can one remain a dispassionate thinker when involved in the cut and thrust of politics? And, in an age of horror and crisis, what does it mean to be a committed writer? Shatz interrogates the major figures of twentieth and twenty-first century thought and finds within their lives and work the roots of our present intellectual and geopolitical situation. Charting the role of the committed intellectual through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre on the Algerian War and Edward Said's lifelong solidarity with the Palestinian people, to Fouad Ajami's role as the "native informant" for pro-intervention cause in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, alongside philosophers and critics Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss and the novelists Michel Houllebecq and Richard Wright, each struggled to reconcile their writing and their politics, their thought and their commitments. Writers and Missionaries is an erudite and incisive work of intellectual elucidation and biographical enquiry that demands that we interrogate anew the relation of thought and action in the struggle for a more just world.