The Robeson Story

Martin Duberman’s excellent biography supplies a great deal of new information and insight about a man previously shrouded in myth. What Paul Robeson thought is still elusive—he wrote very little and maintained a “protective secretiveness” that not even his friends could penetrate. But Duberman’s sympathetic portrait of the public man facilitates interpretation.

Duberman’s book benefits from but shares the limits of recent revisionist work on the Communi...