Historical/Biographical Note

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:

• The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical, Macmillan, 1950
• Editor, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poetry and Prose, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951
• The Enormous Turtle (comic novel under the pseudonym Warren Madden), Bobbs-Merrill, 1954
• The Esdaile Notebook: A volume of Early Prose and Poetry by Shelley (1964)
• Shelley and His Circle (1961-1970)
• Romantic Rebels; Essays on Shelley and his Circle (1973)
• Humanity and Society: A World History (1973)
• Shelley: The Golden Years (1974)
• Marx and Engels Today: A Modern Dialogue on Philosophy and History (1976)
• Poems for Lovers and Rebels (Privately printed, 1977)
• Marxism: The Science of Society—An Introduction (1985)
• Stalin, Man of Contradiction (1987)
• Atmospheric Destruction and Human Survival (1992)
• Marxism: A Living Science (1993)
• Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science (1995)

Sources:

• See also, "Town and Gown: Excerpt from the Bloomington, Indiana Memoir of Kenneth Neill Cameron, Communist Academic in the Working Class Movement." (Peter Meyer Filardo, ed.) Labor History, 36, no. 4 (1995): 612-24.