Kenneth Neill Cameron

Kenneth Neill Cameron (15 September 1908 – 14 March 1994) was a British-born literary scholar who grew up in Canada. He became an authority on the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his circle of English Romantic writers. Cameron was also a lifelong Marxist who wrote about dialectical materialism, the Marxist theory of history, and the Soviet Union.

Early life and education Cameron was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England, and emigrated to Canada with his family at the age of five. Upon his return to Canada, he served as Executive Secretary of the Canadian League Against War and Fascism in Toronto in 1934-35;

Cameron did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a Ph.D. in 1939.

Academic career Cameron taught in the English Department at Indiana University from 1939 to 1952. Throughout the 1940s, he published scholarly papers, mostly on Shelley, in academic journals such as The Sewanee Review, PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, Modern Language Notes, Notes and Queries, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and English Literary History.

In 1963 Cameron was appointed Professor of English at New York University, where he remained until his retirement as emeritus professor in 1975. He was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by McGill University in 1971. He engaged in debates about the Marxian interpretation of history, philosophy, science, and the role of the Soviet Union in books such as Humanity and Society: A World History (1972), Marx and Engels Today: A Modern Dialogue on Philosophy and History (1976), Marxism: The Science of Society (1985), Stalin: Man of Contradiction (1987), and Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science (1994).

Later life and death In 1978 a volume of essays in Cameron's honor, The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions Between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, was published by his fellow scholars and former students. In 1982 the Keats-Shelley Association of America presented him with its first Distinguished Scholar Award.

On 14 March 1994, Kenneth Cameron died of pneumonia in New York City at age 85. He was survived by his wife, Mary Owen Cameron, a daughter and two grandchildren.