John Sommerfield

John Sommerfield
1940s ink drawing of John Sommerfield
Born	Jack Hugo Sommerfeld (1908-06-25)25 June 1908 London
Died	13 August 1991(1991-08-13) (aged 83) Oxfordshire
Nationality	British
Occupation	Writer, communist, veteran of spanish civil war

John Sommerfield (25 June 1908 – 13 August 1991) was a British writer and left-wing activist known for his influential novel May Day, which fictionalised a Communist upheaval in 1930s London. Sommerfield volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War and wrote one of the first combatant accounts of that conflict. He later served in the Royal Air Force in World War II.

Born Jack Hugo Sommerfield in West London, Sommerfield left University College School at the age of 16 and worked as a newspaper delivery boy, stage hand and merchant seaman before moving to the Chelsea area, where he was active in the Communist party. He appears to have joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s and it was a major part of his life for the following quarter-of-a-century. He wrote columns for several Communist periodicals, including the Daily Worker, and was active in the Communist Party Writers' Group.

Sommerfield's first two books, They Die Young (1930) – which was published in the United States as The Death of Christopher – and Behind the Scenes (1934) drew upon his experiences at sea and as a stage hand. 1936 saw the publication of May Day, which is considered Sommerfield's most important work. The novel was published by the Communist Party's publishing house, and describes a few days in the lives of protagonist James Seton and various other people around London leading up to a general strike and a political breakthrough for Communism in Britain.

Shortly after the publication of May Day, Sommerfield volunteered for the International Brigades, fighting in the Spanish Civil War alongside his friend John Cornford. After returning he discovered that he had been reported dead. During World War II he served as an aircraft support mechanic in Burma and India. This wartime service in Asia with the RAF provided the inspiration for some of his best short stories, collected after the war as The Survivors (1947).