Scholars most often consider Eldridge Cleaver in relation to his brief time in the national spotlight as author of the best-selling essay collection Soul on Ice and prominent member of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver, a towering man with a gift for interlacing the profound with the profane and an unflinching willingness to confront that which he deemed unjust, embodied a brash magnetism that many found compelling, others found dangerous, but that few could ignore. Certainly, in the late 1960s, Eldridge Cleaver was larger than life—a consequence of his captivating persona that, as a historical figure, was simplified to the symbolisms of iconicity. Indeed, iconicity, be it in the interest of valorizing heroes or damning villains, is a warped historic lens, possessing the twin effect of enlarging and narrowing its subject. Yet, Justin Gifford’s biography, Revolution or Death: The Life of Eldridge Cleaver, offers a fuller account of Cleaver’s life. Revolution or Death is a compelling read that deepens and contextualizes the mythic Cleaver of the radical 1960s in a longer, more complicated life of committed activism, political permutations, and personal demons.

Revolution or Death is remarkably well-researched. Gifford impressively combs through documents ranging from Cleaver’s Arkansian family genealogy, his prison correspondence, transnational state surveillance, and various university collections of his more obscure writings. One of the key figures in Gifford’s research is a woman of striking resolve and commitment to Cleaver, Beverley Axelrod. Axelrod, a steadfast social justice lawyer, is the focal figure in securing Cleaver’s freedom as well as his conduit to the progressive literary scene. It is Axelrod who brokered Cleaver’s publishing deal while he was incarcerated in Folsom and, later, San Quentin. Nearly a fourth of Revolution or Death’s chapters recount Cleaver’s 11-year stretch in numerous California prisons. Gifford explores the role the carcel state had on Cleaver’s drive for knowledge, conception of freedom, and the development of discursive style. Like his hero, Malcolm X, it is behind bars that Cleaver transforms politically and finds his authorial voice—a voice that would ultimately amalgamate into the 1968 collection of essays, Soul on Ice. Cleaver’s book, and its status in both prison literature and Black Power literature, is well known, and Gifford offers insight into how Cleaver wrote it to, “save himself existentially” (98). Yet, Gifford devotes less time to close reading and critiquing Soul on Ice and more to presenting the text as a culmination of Cleaver’s evolution from criminal to critical thinker, the document that opened the door to the radical left scene upon his release from prison.

With the success of Soul on Ice, Cleaver was poised to become, and initially seems committed to developing into, a meaningful writer. However, Gifford turns to Cleaver’s correspondence with Axelrod, with whom he is most candid, to show that almost the moment Soul on Ice was completed, Cleaver prophesizes and laments his fading commitment to writing. From the time of his release, and his rise as a public figure with the Panthers through his years in exile, Gifford recurrently notes Cleaver’s frustration with his inability to return to the focus and productivity on the page he found in a prison cell. Cleaver’s belated 1978 follow-up, Soul on Fire, an attempt to become the “black Billy Graham,” is presented as evidence of Cleaver bottoming out as a writer (252–253). One is left to wonder how Cleaver’s swift rise as a public figure, ironically spawned in great part by his writing, may have stifled his authorial evolution. While beyond the scope of Gifford’s biographical effort, work remains to be done by literary scholars exploring Cleaver’s unpublished manuscripts. In the vein of Tommy Curry’s exploration of masculinity in Cleaver’s unpublished prison-time semiautobiographical novel, A Book Lives, there is still room to consider what his unpublished writings tell us about him as an author and theorist.

While Gifford’s engagement with numerous established archives is impressive, it is the personal archive of Eldridge’s former wife and comrade, Kathleen Cleaver, which sets his research apart. Indeed, among scholarship on Cleaver, this aspect of the archival work is unprecedented. Kathleen Cleaver provided Gifford with a historian’s treasure trove of materials, ranging from Eldridge Cleaver’s unpublished manuscripts to letters from fans and lovers. Further, she secured Gifford special permission to access letters between herself and Eldridge that are otherwise sealed at Berkeley until 2025. Thus, his time as Black Panther Party Minister of Information, as head of the Panthers’ international section in Algeria, and his fallout with the Panthers and move to Paris, are seated in the intimate details of these powerful new documents.

Through this new archive, as well as her interviews with Gifford, Kathleen speaks to the complexity of her relationship to Eldridge with great candor. Their personal correspondence, which lays bare many details of this turbulent phase in their union, is mainly contextualized in Gifford’s exploration of Eldridge’s time in exile. In the wake of his involvement in a shooting with Oakland police at the height of his fame in 1968, Cleaver fled to Cuba, where Kathleen would later join him. Certainly, Gifford capably narrates Cleaver’s ascent into the public spotlight in California as contributor to Ramparts magazine, the editor of the Black Panther newspaper, a presidential candidate and outspoken adversary to, then Governor, Ronald Reagan. However, he offers new insight into the role Cleaver’s time abroad had on his evolution as a Marxist thinker, a conduit between newly independent nations and the Panthers, and his increasing paranoia and volatility. Cleaver’s nearly 7 years in exile, spent in Cuba, Algeria, North Korea, and France, reads as a man who, struggling with a waning public status, shaky support from his host nations and the always stalking FBI, is, both personally and politically in search of a new direction. From a concerted, and initially promising, effort to organize alliances between third-world communist nations and American Black Power movement, to his venture into fashion design and ultimately his spiritual re-birth in Paris, this period is marked by Cleaver’s striding towards his greatest ambitions and backsliding into violent tendencies.

Gifford documents Cleaver as “a troubled man who survived by any means necessary” (xii). It is in the latter stages of his life, that Revolution or Death interrogates the extent of this claim. The late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, documented in the book’s final three chapters, speed by in a whirlwind of curious transmutations in political and spiritual commitment. Cleaver returns to America to stand trial with a newly found evangelical faith in nation and capitalism. Over the next decade, in Gifford’s words, Cleaver devolves into a “carnival sideshow, a black radical turned conservative” (270) who is seemingly willingly appropriated by the far-right in denouncement of his radical past and compatriots. While on a speaking tour with CARP, the campus ministry arm of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Gifford recalls that Cleaver, who was primarily preaching anticommunism, was jeered nightly by beleaguered radicals who felt the once tenable revolution slipping. On one such occasion, Gifford writes, “a man shouted out “this is the real Eldridge Cleaver” and then played a tape of him giving a speech from his Black Panther days” (271). The paradox of this heckler telling Cleaver who the “real Eldridge Cleaver” really was, is startling in its illustrative clarity. This instance exemplifies a greater historic wistfulness for a “real” Cleaver, a nearly mythic figure, tethered exclusively to a brief moment in time. Yet, Cleaver was as much the reactionary on stage as he was the radical on the audio recording. Indeed, Gifford suggests that Cleaver’s “irreconcilable contradictions” (vii) may be inconvenient, but the book reminds us that people are never just one thing and that it is a disservice to imagine they are. Moreover, he suggests that dedicated consideration of polarizing figures, like Cleaver, is critical to understanding the elements of society that made, embraced and/or rejected them. Revolution or Death provides a most comprehensive and gripping biography of Eldridge Cleaver, and offers us not the occasion to reinvest in a hero or discard a heel, but to consider how, and why, one man could occupy both roles so convincingly.