Ralph Winston Fox (30 March 1900, Halifax, United Kingdom - 28 December 1936, Lopera, Jaén, Spain) was a British novelist, biographer (of Lenin and Genghis Khan), social historian, journalist, translator and politician.
Fox studied modern languages at Oxford University, identified himself with socialist and communist political movements after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1920, where he saw the effects of the Russian Revolution of 1917 for himself. He was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Great Britain and became a central figure in the cultural politics of the Party and across the Left in general. In 1936, in order to fight in the Spanish Civil War, Fox joined the International Brigades through the French Communist Party in Paris. When he arrived in Spain at the end of the year, he was sent to be trained in Albacete and was assigned to the XIV Brigade. After some weeks as a political commissar at the base he went to the front in one of the first operations in which the Brigades were involved, and he died at the battle of Lopera in the province of Jaén in December, 1936, though some biographies give January 1937, the date when his death was made public.
'Ralph Fox: A Writer in Arms' [Lawrence & Wishart], a memorial selection and appreciation, appeared in 1937. The bulletin of the Marx Memorial Library contains recent articles on Fox, and the Library holds many of Fox's papers and publications. To date there are only two extended accounts of Fox: Mike Freeman's 2009 study of Fox's life and cultural politics, 'Ralph Fox: Telling the Times' and a biographical essay by Don Hallett in the 2009 proceedings of the Halifax Antiquarian Society. Primary sources on Fox and the two above studies are available at Marx Memorial Library, the Working Class Movement Library at Salford, and Halifax Central Library.
'Genghis Khan. New York, Harcourt Brace and Company. 1936. 'Communism'. London: John Lane, 1935 'The Novel and the People'. London: Lawrence & Wishart,1937 'This Was Their Youth'. London: Secker & Warburg,1937 'Storming Heaven'. London: Constable, 1928 'People of the Steppes'. London: Constable, 1925 'Lenin'. London: Victor Gollancz, 1933 .The Colonial Policy of British Imperialism,London, Martin Lawrence ,1933