Kenneth Neill Cameron
Kenneth Neill Cameron was a British-born literary scholar and an authority on the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the wider circle of English Romantic writers.
Early life
Cameron was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England, and emigrated to Canada with his family at the age of five. He graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1931. Later Cameron studied at Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before earning his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1939. He became interested academically in Shelley during his Oxford years.Academic career
Cameron taught in the English Department at Indiana University from 1939 to 1952. His biography The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical redefined Shelley studies by linking the poet’s work to its historical and political context. In 1952 he joined the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library in New York as editor of Shelley and His Circle, overseeing the acquisition and publication of its first four volumes between 1961 and 1970.In 1963 Cameron became Professor of English at New York University, where he remained until his retirement as emeritus professor in 1975. His later works included Shelley: The Golden Years and several Marxist studies such as Marx and Engels Today and Marxism: The Science of Society.