E. P. Thompson
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Edward Palmer Thompson (February 3, 1924 - August 28, 1993), was an English historian, 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 his book The Making of the English Working Class (1963), but he also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist as well as publishing one novel and a collection of poetry. He was one of the main intellectual members of the Communist Party who left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and he 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 during the 1980s he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
Key works
- The Making of the English Working Class London: Victor Gollancz (1963); 2nd edition with new postscript, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, third edition with new preface 1980.
- Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism. Past & Present 38(1), 56-97 (1967)
- Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, London: Allen Lane, 1975; with a new postcript, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977; London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2012.
- (editor) Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, London: Allen Lane, 1975.
- William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1st ed. London: Lawrence & Wishart 1955, revised 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon, 1976).
- The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London: Merlin Press, 1978.
- Writing by Candlelight, London: Merlin Press, 1980.
- Zero Option, London: Merlin Press, 1982.
- Double Exposure, London: Merlin Press, 1985.
- The Heavy Dancers, London: Merlin Press, 1985.
- The Sykaos Papers, London: Bloomsbury, 1988.
- Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, London: Merlin Press, 1991.
- Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- Making History: Writings on History and Culture, New York: New Press, 1994 (British edition: Persons & Polemics, Merlin Press, London 1994, ISBN 0850364396).
- Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, Rendlesham: Merlin, 1997.
- The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1997.
- Collected Poems, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999.
