The Two Cultures

By C. P. Snow

1959

Essay / Cultural criticism

C. P. Snow's 1959 Rede Lecture, expanded into a short book, argues that intellectual life has split into two incompatible cultures: the sciences and the literary humanities, each ignorant of and contemptuous toward the other. Snow, himself a novelist and physicist, contended that this failure of communication had practical consequences for education, policy, and national decline. The essay sparked one of the most heated literary controversies of the 20th century, most famously F. R. Leavis's savage rebuttal.