Cornforth was born in Willesden, London, in 1909, and educated at University College School,[1] where he was friends with Stephen Spender.
[1][2] Rejected for military service on medical grounds, during the Second World War Cornforth worked as a farm labourer.
[1] In 1950 he was appointed as managing director of Lawrence & Wishart, a post he held until 1975, during which period he was responsible for the publishing of Marx's and Engels's Collected Works.
Both the insights are based on the theory of the primacy of physical work and tools (thus, "materialism") in the development of specifically human traits such as language, abstract thought, and social organisation, and the essential role of the external world in the increasingly complex development of forms of life.
The text originated from lectures that Cornforth received funding for from the London District Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1950.