E.P. Thompson

(1924 - 1993)

During World War II, E.P. Thompson served in Africa and Italy. When he returned, he went to Cambridge and joined the British Communist Party. Thompson later cofounded New Left Review and wrote The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson sought to save the “Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” A reviewer wrote of the classic text, “From the first of its 900-odd pages, I knew, and my friends at the University of Sussex knew, that this was something else. We talked about it in the bar and on the bus and in the refectory queue. Imagine that: young male students more interested in a book than in gooseberry tart and custard.” He died at the age of sixty-nine in Worcester after a four-year-long illness.