Cameron, Kenneth Neill

Kenneth Neill Cameron was a literary critic and Percy Bysshe Shelley biographer and scholar. He was the author of Romantic rebels; essays on Shelley and his circle, Shelley: the golden years, Young Shelley; genesis of a radical, and editor of Shelley and his circle, 1773-1822 and The Esdaile notebook; a volume of early poems .

From the guide to the Kenneth Cameron Manuscripts, 1963-1967, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)

Kenneth Neill Cameron (1908-1994), was a scholar of Percy Byshhe Shelley’s writings and social and political milieu, best known for his four-volume Shelley and His Circle (1961-1970), and a Communist activist and author. Cameron was born in 1908 in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, England. He moved with his parents to Montreal in 1914, where he lived until he received his B.A. from McGill in 1931. As a Rhodes Scholar, he attended Oxford University and received a second B.A. in 1933, a D. Litt. in 1934, and an M.A. in 1936. He also received a Ph.D. in 1939 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and, much later, an honorary Ph.D. from McGill University in 1970.

Cameron first encountered radical politics in England, partly through his uncle Jack Cameron, who was a radical shipyard worker in Liverpool, and partly through campus activism at Oxford. In 1934 he visited the U.S.S.R. and was deeply moved by what he saw. Cameron joined the Canadian Communist Party around 1935. In 1936 he was the Toronto Executive Secretary of the League against War and Fascism.

At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Cameron studied under the scholar William Emery Leonard, and continued his activism in the Communist Party of the United States. In the fall of 1939, Cameron began what was to be a thirteen-year career at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he was especially active in the American Federation of Teachers and was also involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. At Indiana University, Cameron lived for a short while with Salvadore Luria, later a Nobel Laureate in Physics. Around the same time (1946), he married Mary Bess Owen, a professor of sociology.

In 1951, as the political climate became more hostile to Communists, partly as a result of the success of his first book, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (1950), Cameron left Indiana University and was given a job at the private Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, now part of the New York Public Library, in New York City. He edited Shelley and His Circle, overseeing the first four volumes produced by that library. During the 1950s, he was active in the disarmament movement in New York. In the 1960s he began teaching at New York University, first as an adjunct, and then as a full-time professor in 1963. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 for ongoing research on Shelley, which culminated in the publication of Shelley: The Golden Years, in 1974

In his later years, Cameron was involved in the movements against the Vietnam War, the far right, and nuclear testing. He was Professor Emeritus of English at NYU from 1974-75, and then retired. While his Shelley scholarship did not end here, he chiefly wrote on a number of other topics in the 1970s and 1980s, producing a book of poems in 1977, as well as several books on Marxism, a biography of Joseph Stalin, ecology, and a world history. He also wrote several unpublished manuscripts on Shelley, various Communist leaders and statesmen, including an unpublished book on Enver Hoxha, Communist leader of Albania, four unpublished plays, and his unfinished autobiography. He died in March, 1994.

Books by Cameron in chronological order:

Sources:

From the guide to the Kenneth Neill Cameron Papers, 1910-1992, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Kenneth Neill Cameron (1908-1994) was one of the 20th century's leading authorities on the works of Shelley and other important figures in the history of English Romanticism. His work changed the course of Shelley studies in the United States and restored Shelley's reputation, which had been in decline for decades.

Cameron was born in England, and moved to Canada with his family in 1914. He took degrees from McGill University, in Montreal, and at Oxford University (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), as well a receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He taught at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana, from 1939 until 1952, when he accepted a job at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library in New York City (a private repository of late 18th- and early 19th-century literary materials), where he worked until 1965. While at the Pforzheimer he edited Shelley and His Circle, overseeing the first four volumes produced by that library. He became a professor of English at New York University in 1963 and continued to teach there until his retirement in 1975.

Cameron was also a committed and politically active Marxist who joined the Canadian Communist Party in his youth. While teaching at Indiana University he helped to organize chapters of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the 1950s and 1960s, he became involved in the movements for nuclear disarmament and against the war in Vietnam. In addition to his literary works, Cameron published books on Marxism and Stalinism, and his literary work was informed by his political worldview. His prize-winning biography, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (1950) took Shelley's social message seriously, as did his other works on Shelley.

From the guide to the Kenneth Neill Cameron Photographs, Circa 1932-1990s, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)