C.P. Snow
in full Charles Percy Snow, Baron
Snow Of The City Of Leicester
born Oct. 15, 1905, Leicester,
Leicestershire, Eng.
died July 1, 1980, London
British novelist, scientist, and
government administrator.
Snow was graduated from Leicester
University and earned a doctorate in physics
at the University of Cambridge, where, at
the age of 25, he became a fellow of
Christ’s College. After working at Cambridge
in molecular physics for some 20 years, he
became a university administrator, and, with
the outbreak of World War II, he became a
scientific adviser to the British
government. He was knighted in 1957 and made
a life peer in 1964. In 1950 he married the
British novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson.
In the 1930s Snow began the 11-volume
novel sequence collectively called
“Strangers and Brothers” (published
1940–70), about the academic, public, and
private life of an Englishman named Lewis
Eliot. The novels are a quiet (though not
dull) and meticulous analysis of
bureaucratic man and the corrupting
influence of power. Several of Snow’s novels
were adapted for the stage. Later novels
include In Their Wisdom (1974) and Coat of
Varnish (1979).
As both a literary man and a scientist,
Snow was particularly well equipped to write
a book about science and literature; The Two
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
(1959) and its sequel, Second Look (1964),
constitute Snow’s most widely known—and
widely attacked—position. He argued that
practitioners of either of the two
disciplines know little, if anything, about
the other and that communication is
difficult, if not impossible, between them.
Snow thus called attention to a breach in
two of the major branches of Western
culture, a breach long noted but rarely
enunciated by a figure respected in both
fields. Snow acknowledged the emergence of a
third “culture” as well, the social sciences
and arts concerned with “how human beings
are living or have lived.” Many of Snow’s
writings on science and culture are found in
Public Affairs (1971). Trollope: His Life
and Art (1975) exemplifies Snow’s powers in
literary criticism, as does The Realists:
Eight Portraits (1979).
