Louise Cripps was born in
London, England, in 1904, into a middle-class family. She studied journalism at
University College London during the mid-1920s and aimed to become a literary writer, though found work in London as a journalist and editor working for various publications including
Nursery World and
British Vogue. Politically radicalising during the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe, she became a Marxist in the early 1930s, joining the tiny British
Trotskyist movement and working in the
Marxist Group. During the Second World War, she moved to New York and worked for the
British War Relief Society, editing a publication
Salute: a tribute to courage for British War Relief, and published her first book
Your first baby! (1943). After the war she continued to work as a journalist and publisher, editing an American publication
Baby Post. In the 1960s, she moved for her retirement to
Puerto Rico, where she wrote many books about the island and putting the case for independence, as well as other works of history and a novel,
Lirazel. Over the course of her life, Cripps knew many key intellectual figures of the twentieth century, including
C. L. R. James (with whom she had a relationship during the 1930s),
Bertrand Russell,
John Dewey,
George Grosz,
Dr. Benjamin Spock,
Harold Laski,
Gordon K. Lewis,
Norman Thomas,
G. K. Chesterton,
Havelock Ellis,
Izrael Hieger and
Earle Birney. Her first marriage was to the writer
Bernard Glemser, whom she married in early 1932 and with whom she had one son, Martin, before marrying Leon A. Samoiloff, a Russian-born Harvard-educated man in 1946. She died at her home in
Dorado, Puerto Rico, on 21 September 2001. == Publications==