The Martinican psychiatrist and political philosopher whose Black Skin, White Masks analyzed the psychological damage of colonialism on the colonized subject, and whose The Wretched of the Earth provided the theoretical framework for anti-colonial revolution — arguing that decolonization was necessarily violent, that national consciousness was insufficient without social transformation, and that the postcolonial state risked reproducing colonial structures under new management.
Fanon wrote his two most important books while dying. Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952, had been rejected as his doctoral thesis — a psychoanalytic account of what colonialism did to the mind of the colonized person, written by a 26-year-old Martinican who had fought for France in World War II and was now training as a psychiatrist in Lyon. The Wretched of the Earth was dictated in ten weeks in 1961 while he was dying of leukemia at 36, and published the year he died, with a preface by Sartre that made it immediately famous and immediately controversial. Between those two books is a life spent on the wrong side of colonial power, and a theory of how that power worked and how to end it.