Christopher St John Sprigg was born in London in 1907, descended from several generations of journalists, educated in catholic schools. He left school and started work as a journalist at 15. He also wote detective thrillers, aeronautics text books, poetry, plays, short stories and a novel. He read voluminously in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, politics, linguistics, mathematics, economics, physics, biology, neurology, literature and literary criticism and much more besides. In 1934, at the age of 27, Sprigg became interested in marxism and began to study it with extraordinary intensity, discovering that it provided the key to the synthesis he was seeking. He wrote his first marxist book Illusion and Reality in 1935 and then moved to Poplar and joined the communist party. He threw himself into all party tasks: fly-posting, street corner speaking, selling The Daily Worker, battling with blackshirts, facing battering and arrest. He contined to write - everything from minutes of party meetings to theoretical works of astonishing erudition. When the Spanish civil war broke out, the Poplar branch raised money for an ambulance and he volunteered to drive it to Spain. On arrival, he joined the international brigades. At the battle of Jarama, he was killed in action. He was last seen firing a machine gun, covering the retreat of his comrades. He was not yet 30. His marxist writings were published posthumously under the name of Christopher Caudwell, a name he had decided to use for his serious works, so as not to ruin his reputation as a writer of thrillers. His marxist works were: Illusion and Reality, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, The Crisis in Physics, Romance and Realism, Heredity and Development.

There was a centenary conference / celebration for Christopher Caudwell on 20 October 2007 in London sponsored by the Marx Memorial Library.