Karl Marx : His Life and Thought is a 1973 biography of Karl Marx by the political scientist David McLellan. The work was republished as Karl Marx: A Biography in 1995.
Bibliographic information First edition published in London and New York: ; preview of McLellan 1973 in Google Books. McLellan 1973 (New York): . See also: a second copy, available for borrow at Internet Archive.
These editions were republished several times,For an overview of some of the published editions, also in other languages than English, see: in different forms, also as an e-book (after the MacMillan 1973 edition).E-book freely available at Springer.
In 1995 a republication appeared under a different name: McLellan 1995: First pages available via archive.org. This new (third) edition contains a short postscript: 'Marx Today', in which McLellan describes how the events of the twentieth century shaped the view of Marx; apart from that the bibliography was brought up to date.
In 1975 McLellan also wrote a much more condensed biography of Karl Marx, of 88 pages, with the simple title Marx. This work was reprinted many times (12 times between 1975 and 1988).
Background The first generally known and complete biography of Karl Marx was written by Franz Mehring, and published, first in German as Karl Marx. Geschichte seines Leben (Karl Marx: The Story of His Life) in 1918.
It would take fifty-five years, before the next really important biography of Marx was written. This was Karl Marx : His Life and Thoughts by McLellan (1973). "What Mehring's biography had been for the first half of the twentieth century — the standard thus far — McLellan’s was for the second half (and probably even today)."
Summary
McLellan deals with Marx's intellectual, political and private life. Marx had his fair share of suffering. Born in 1818, Marx spent his entire life in exile from his native Germany. Two of his children died in infancy, one in childhood, and a fourth shortly before Marx's own death in 1883. For many years he was besieged by creditors and afflicted by a variety of illnesses, the most painful being a near-fatal carbuncular disease, (skin infection resulting in boils), that caused him immense suffering during his last twenty years.
Reception The political theorist Terrell Carver described the book as, "The most comprehensive scholarly account of Marx's life and works".Carver 1995. p. 211. The historian of science Roger Smith called it "readable and reliable".
References
Bibliography
See also Biographies of Karl Marx