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 his account of Marx’s writings with the story of his sometimes tempestuously chaotic life, giving detailed accounts of his activities as a revolutionary in both continental Europe & in London, to which Marx was permanently exiled following the defeatd of 1848.
Marx’s most important works—the Grundrisse & Capital among them—were written in extremely difficult conditions, conditions that would surely have silenced many a lesser human. Marx was living in London, with a family to care for & no regular source of income except journalistic commissions from the NY Daily Tribune. McLellan gives a vivid picture of the poverty & privations that the family suffered, privations that would surely have defeated even him had it not been for the generosity of Friedrich Engels, who selflessly subsidised them for almost all of their quarter-century in London. Engels—these days unjustly maligned as a crude simplifier of Marx’s thinking—in many ways emerges as the real hero of the story.
Perhaps the most harrowing episodes in Marx’s life were the premature deaths of his children. His son, Edgar, died in 1855 at 8 while the family was living in a squalid two-roomed flat in Soho. Marx wrote to Engels on April 6th: “Poor Edgar is no more. He went to sleep (literally) in my arms today between 5 & 6”. Wm Leibknecht, a family friend, wrote of what he saw: “The mother silently weeping, bent over the dead child, Lenchen sobbing beside her, Marx in a terrible agitation vehemently, almost angrily, rejecting all consolation, the two girls clinging to their mother crying quietly, the mother clasping them convulsively as if to hold them & defend them against Death that had robbed her of her boy.” A few months later, Marx wrote to Lassalle: “Bacon says that really important men have so many relations with nature & the world that they recover easily from every loss. I do not belong to these important men. The death of my child has deeply shaken my heart & mind & I still feel the loss as freshly as on t