Introduction

In the Bookmark feature several commentators discuss University of Missouri historian Jonathan Sperber's much-cited new biography, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life in a scholarly exchange that originated in the Newberry Library's fall 2013 Labor History Seminar. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading Sperber's well-turned prose, Rosemary Feurer offers a useful précis. Then, historians John Abbott, Bruce Levine, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Susan Pearson share their spirited appreciations and critiques that inevitably involve political as well as historical judgments. Appropriately, Sperber has the last word.