Charles Percy Snow斯诺简介

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;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 Leicesterborn Oct. 15, 1905, Leicester, Leicestershire, Eng.died July 1, 1980, LondonC.P. SnowBritish 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 wereadapted 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).LifeBorn 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 workSnow'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 BlackMemorial Prize in 1954. Corridors of Power added a phrase to the language of the day.In The Realists, an examination of the work of eight novelists — Stendhal, Honoréde Balzac, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Benito Pérez Galdós, Henry James and Marcel Proust — Snow makes a robust defence of the realistic novel.The storyline of his novel, The Search, is referenced in Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, and is used to help elicit the murderer's motive.The Two CulturesMain article: The Two CulturesOn 7 May 1959, Snow delivered an influential Rede Lecture called The Two Cultures, which provoked "widespread and heated debate". Subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, the lecture argued that the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society —the sciences and the humanities —was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. In particular, Snow argues that the quality of education in the world is on the decline. For example, many scientists have never read Charles Dickens, but artistic intellectuals are equally non-conversant with science. He wrote:A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy. The response was cold: it was also negative. Y et I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.The satirists Flanders and Swann utilised the first part of this quotation as the basis for their short monologue and song "First and Second Law".WorksFictionStrangers and Brothers SequenceTime of Hope, 1949George Passant (first published as Strangers and Brothers), 1940The Conscience of the Rich, 1958The Light and the Dark, 1947The Masters, 1951The New Men, 1954 Homecomings, 1956The Affair, 1959Corridors of Power, 1963The Sleep of Reason, 1968Last Things, 1970Other FictionDeath Under Sail, 1932The Search, 1934The Malcontents, 1972In Their Wisdom, 1974A Coat of V arnish, 1979Non-fictionScience and Government, 1961The two cultures and a second look, 1963 V ariety of men, 1967The State of Siege, 1968Public Affairs, 1971Trollope: His Life and Art, 1975The Realists, 1978The Physicists, 1981。