Trained as a physicist and at one time a fellow in physics at Cambridge University, C. P. Snow wrote a number of papers on the problems of molecular structure. He was knighted in 1957 for his important work in organizing scientific personnel for the Ministry of Labour during World War II and for his services as a civil service commissioner. Snow's Variety of Men (1967), biographical essays on nine men---including Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, and Joseph Stalin drew upon his professional experience in the worlds of science, literature, and public affairs. His sequence of novels, Strangers and Brothers, occupied him for more than 20 years. Strangers and Brothers, the first to be written in the series that bears its name, was published in Britain in 1940 and released in the United States in 1960. The 11-volume cycle relates the life story of a young British lawyer named Lewis Eliot, who is very much like Snow himself. Science and Government (1961) tells the story of the bitter wartime clash between two eminent British scientist-advisers to the government. The story has a moral and purpose---to show the need for more scientists and scientific foresight in government. Snow's view that society is split into two antagonistic groups, humanists and scientists, is discussed in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). A violent transatlantic debate resulted when F. R. Leavis wrote a diatribe against Snow as a novelist and thinker for the Spectator. Snow was married to the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson.
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Most recently he is author of ''The Chatto List': Publishing Literary Criticism in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain', (Review of English Studies 63, 2012) and What Are Universities For? (2012).
