Class Act

Ewan MacColl is one of the outstanding British singers and songwriters of the mid to late 20th century, and his work has been covered by artists including Roberta Flack, Johnny Cash and the Pogues. He was also a committed political activist. For sixty years he was at the cultural forefront of numerous political struggles, producing plays, songs and radio programs on subjects ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the Poll Tax. A founder-member of Theatre Workshop, MacColl as the famous company's resident dramatist, and his plays earned the admiration of contemporaries including George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey and Hugh MacDiarmid. MacColl lived an energetic and colorful life. This is the first biography of MacColl, and was prepared with the authorization of his collaborator and widow, Peggy Seeger. It charts MacColl's early years, his involvement in the Communist Party, in radical theatre, his pioneering radio programs, as well as his extensive work in the British folk-revival. Exhaustively researched and energetically written, this is an illuminating account of a major and controversial twentieth-century political artist.