Engels, Friedrich 1820-95
German philosopher and politician

Born in Barmen, he lived mostly in England after 1842. Having gained experience from working in his father's cotton factory in Manchester and established contacts with the Chartist movement, he wrote Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1845). He first met Karl Marx at Brussels in 1844 and collaborated with him on the Communist Manifesto (1848), and returned to Germany with his mentor in 1848 to work on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and fight on the barricades at Baden during the unsuccessful revolution of that year. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels devoted the remaining years of his life to editing and translating Marx's writings, including the second (1885) and third (1894) volumes of the influential Das Kapital, which established the materialist interpretation of history.

Bibliography: Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: A Biography (1936)