Word: snow
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Judged one of the promising young men in British science, Snow knew that he lacked the scientist's "singleminded devotion" and that he really wanted to write novels. He published his first, a mystery, in 1932 and continued writing fiction throughout the decade. He also branched into administrative work. The Royal Society asked him to help organize and mobilize scientists for the coming war; when the Ministry of Labor assumed this task. Snow became a civil servant. After World War II he was named a civil service commissioner and charged with evaluating the best and the brightest young graduates...
...Strangers and Brothers," a sequence of eleven novels that appeared between 1940 and 1970, is a massive portrait of the men who make things work in England. Its protagonist, Lewis Eliot, follows a path very similar to Snow's; he rises from humble origins to prominence in the fields of science, education and government. He is both a participant in important decisions and a careful observer of those who wield and seek influence. Snow's abiding interest in such industrious achievers left him well behind modernism; he wrote about men in public roles at a time when most...
...dramatically, did "The Two Cultures," the title of a 1959 Cambridge lecture. Snow decried the willful ignorance of humanists about science and the chasm between arts and technology. The speech drew worldwide attention, including a scathing ad hominem attack by Cambridge Don F.R. Leavis. Snow's argument no longer seems controversial because it has been so generally accepted: it is important for humanists and everyone else to know what scientists are doing...
Polemics did not ruffle Snow. Tall, portly and bald, he remained a genial, accessible figure in London's streets and clubs. He lived quietly with Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, whom he married in 1950, and openly relished the honors that rained down on him. He was made a life peer by the Labor government of Harold Wilson in 1964. Although the practice was uncommon in such circumstances, Lord Snow took out a coat of arms. The design bridged the two cultures, showing two quill pens crossed over a telescope. It also included two Siamese cats, his favorite breed...
DIED. C. (for Charles) P. (for Percy) Snow, 74, English scientist, civil servant, playwright and novelist whose writing probed the conflicts of power and conscience; of a perforated gastric ulcer; in London (see BOOKS...