Born in French Martinique, Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry in France after the Second World War. His Peau noire, masques blancs (1952, trs. as Black Skin, White Masks, 1967), analysed the deforming effect of colonialism on both black and white peoples. His best-known work, Les Damnés de la terre (1961, trs. as The Wretched of the Earth, 1964), legitimizes the violence necessary to overthrow the established structural violence of colonialism, and had great influence on the emerging black radicalism of the following decades.