Kenneth Neill Cameron Photographs

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.