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Charles Percy Snow(1905-1980) 
 
Sir Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester in 1905. By the 
end of the twenties he graduated from the University of Cambridge 
and went on working there in the field of molecular physics. Snow’s 
academic life continued until the beginning of World War II.
Charles Percy Snow began writing in the thirties. “The 
Search”, the first of his novels, was published in 1934. Six years 
later, in 1940, appeared his novel “Strangers and Brothers” which 
then became the title of a whole sequence of novels written in the 
forties, fifties and sixties. The second novel of the sequence entitled 
“The Light and the Dark”, was published in 1947. It was succeeded 
by the novels “Time of Hope” (1949) and “The Masters” (1951). 
Later on “The New Men” (1954), “Homecomings” (1956), “The Conscience of the Rich” (1959) 
and “The Affair” (1960) were added to it, but the sequence is not yet completed. “Corridors of 
Powers”, the latest of all the novels already written, appeared in 1964. The author himself divided 
all the books of the sequence into two main groups. The first group is called “novels of private 
experience” and includes “Time of Hope” (1947) and “Homecomings” (1956). All the rest belong 
to the group of “novels of conditioned experience”. The main hero of all the books is Louis Eliot, 
scientist and statesman, this is why English literary critics call them “the Louis Eliot sequence”. In 
the so-called “novels of private experience”, Snow describes the life of Louis Eliot in his youth 
(“Time of Hope”) and in the middle age (“Homecomings”), while in other novels the lives of his 
friends, relatives and acquaintances is seen through his eyes. In general, Snow makes an impressive 
study of English society in the twentieth century. True to the method of modern critical realism, the 

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writer places the representatives of different classes and social circles in the centre of his artistic 
attention.
Being a scientist by profession, he manages to create convincing pictures of the relations 
between intellectuals and the upper classes. And, though Snow is very far from communist views 
himself, his description of the social and political struggle contains certain points of criticism of 
bourgeois society. As a realist, Charles Percy Snow mainly gives a generalizing picture of English 
society of yesterday and today, of its most characteristic and typical trends and features. This does 
not prevent him, however, from being a master of individual psychology. In some of his works 
(especially “Time of Hope” and “Homecomings”) the inner life of the characters is brilliantly 
disclosed. However traditional in descriptions, Snow is a subtle and sensitive artist of landscape.

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