Culture Clash

C P Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture coined the phrase “two cultures,” originally contrasting scientific and literary ways of understanding the world, not merely separating disciplines. The essay recounts Snow’s rise from a modest Leicester background, his novel series Strangers and Brothers, and the fierce rebuttal by Cambridge literary critic F R Leavis, who denounced Snow’s view as a “preposterous and menacing absurdity.”