-
Charles Percy
Snow
斯诺简介
1905-1980 Strangers and
Brothers
陌生人与兄弟们
;The Light
and the Dark
光明与黑暗
;Time of
Hope
希望的时刻
;The
Masters
院长们
;The New Men
新人
;Homecoings
归家
< br>;The Conscience of
the
Rich
富人的良心
;The
Affairs
事件
;Corridors of
Power
权力走廊
;The Sleep of
Reason
理智沉
眠
;Last
Things
结局
in full
Charles Percy Snow,
Baron Snow Of The City Of Leicester
born Oct. 15, 1905,
Leicester, Leicestershire, Eng.
died July 1, 1980, London
?
C.P. Snow
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).
Life
Born
in
Leicester,
Snow
was
educated
at
the
Leicestershire
and
Rutland
College,
now
the
University of Leicester, and the
University of Cambridge, where he became a Fellow
of Christ's
College in 1930.
He served several senior
positions in the government of the United Kingdom:
as technical director
of the Ministry
of Labour from 1940 to 1944; as civil service
commissioner from 1945 to 1960;
and
as
parliamentary
secretary
to
the
Minister
of
Technology
from
1964
to
1966.[1]
He
was
knighted
in 1957 and made a life peer, as Baron Snow of the
City of Leicester, in 1964.[1]
Snow married the novelist Pamela
Hansford Johnson in 1950. They had one son.
Friends included
the
mathematician
G
.
H.
Hardy,
for
whom
he
would
write
a
brief
biographical
foreword
in
A
Mathematician's Apology, the physicist
P
. M. S. Blackett, the X-ray
crystallographer J. D. Bernal
and
the
cultural
historian
Jacques
Barzun.
In
1960,
he
gave
the
Godkin
Lectures
at
Harvard
University, about the clashes between
Henry Tizard and F. Lindemann (later Lord
Cherwell), both
scientific
advisors
to
British
governments
around
the
time
of
World
War II.
The
lectures were
subsequently
published
as Science
and
Government.
For
the
academic
year
1961
to
1962,
Lord
and Lady Snow served as
Fellows on the faculty in the Center for Advanced
Studies at Wesleyan
University.
Literary work
Snow's
first
novel was
a whodunit,
Death
under Sail
(1932).
In
1975
he wrote
a
biography
of
Anthony Trollope. But he is better
known as the author of a sequence of novels
entitled Strangers
and Brothers
depicting intellectuals in academic and government
settings in the modern era. The
Masters
is the best-known novel of the sequence. It deals
with the internal politics of a Cambridge
college as it prepares to elect a new
master, and has all the appeal of being an
insider’s view. The
novel
depicts
concerns
other
than
the
strictly
academic
influencing
the
decisions
of supposedly
objective
scholars. The
Masters
and
The
New
Men
were
jointly
awarded
the James
Tait
Black