Ngo Van was born in 1913 into a peasant family living in a village near Saigon. He was active in the revolutionary anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam from 1932 onwards, and participated in workers' and peasants' demonstrations, strikes, and protests, as a Trotskyist militant, undergoing, as did thousands, torture and imprisonment by the French rulers. He died in 2005 in Paris. Ken Knabb translated and published the "Situationist International Anthology," selling over 14,000 copies.