E. P. Thompson
| E.P. Thompson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Edward Palmer Thompson 3 February 1924 Oxford, United Kingdom |
| Died |
(aged 69) Worcester, United Kingdom |
| Alma mater | Corpus Christi College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Historian, writer, socialist, campaign |
| Spouse(s) | Dorothy Thompson (1948–1993; his death) |
| Children | 3 |
Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993), usually cited as E. P. Thompson, was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry. His work is considered to have been among the most important contributions to labour history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.
Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a "historian in the Marxist tradition", calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives". Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and an early and constant supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
E.P. Thompson was born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents: His father, Edward John Thompson (1886–1946) was a poet and admirer of the Nobel Prize–winning poet Tagore. His older brother was William Frank Thompson (1919–1944), a British officer in World War II, who was captured and shot aiding the Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans.
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