W. Arthur Lewis was one of the foremost intellectuals, economists, and political activists of the 20th century. In this book, the first intellectual biography of Lewis, Robert Tignor traces Lewis’s life from its beginnings on the small island of St. Lucia to Lewis’s arrival at Princeton University in the early 1960s. A chronicle of Lewis’s unfailing efforts to promote racial justice and decolonization, it provides a history of development economics as seen through the life of one of its most important founders. If there were a record for the number of “firsts” achieved by one man during his lifetime, Lewis would be a contender. He was the first black professor in a British university and also at Princeton University and the first person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in a field other than literature or peace.