Christopher St John Sprigg (20 October 1907 – 13 February 1937), best known by his pseudonym Christopher Caudwell, was an English Marxist writer, literary critic, intellectual and activist.^[1]

Christopher St John Sprigg was born into a Roman Catholic family,^[1] in Putney, London, on 20 October 1907.^[2] He was educated at the Benedictine Ealing Priory School, but left school at the age of 15 and worked first as a cub reporter at the Yorkshire Observer, where his father was literary editor, and then as editor of British Malaya.^[1]

Two years later his founded an aeronautical publishing company with his brother. He also published on automobiles and he designed a infinitely variable gear. He continued scientific studies and published The Crisis of Physics in 1936.^[3]

Caudwell became interested in Marxism in 1934 and began to study it with "extraordinary intensity". In the summer of 1935, he wrote his first Marxist book entitled Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, which was published by Macmillan.^[1] Following the completion of his book he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.^[1]

According to the socialist magazine Monthly Review, Caudwell on 12 February 1937 "was killed by fascists in the valley of Jarama during the Spanish Civil War. He died at a machine gun post, guarding the retreat of his comrades in the British Battalion of the International Brigade".^[4]

The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson wrote of Caudwell, "It is not difficult to see Caudwell as a phenomenon – as an extraordinary shooting-star crossing England’s empirical night – as a premonitory sign of a more sophisticated Marxism whose true annunciation was delayed until the Sixties". The Marxist academic John Bellamy Foster similarly credited Caudwell with "breathtaking intellectual achievements in a brief period of time".^[4]

In his 1942 introduction to The Fury of the Living, a collection of poems by John Singer, Hugh MacDiarmid called Caudwell (along with John Cornford, another young writer killed fighting in Spain), one of the "few inspiring exceptions" from the "leftist poets of the comfortable classes".^[5]

• Maurice Cornforth