E.P. Thompson; Marxist Historian, Anti-Nuclear Activist

E. P. Thompson, 69, British Marxist historian and anti-nuclear activist. Born in 1924 to a Methodist missionary and his wife, Thompson commanded a tank troop in Italy during World War II and later attended Cambridge University. He first made his mark as a historian in 1955 with a biography of William Morris. But he was best known for his 1963 Marxist-oriented history, “The Making of the English Working Class.” Thompson taught history at Warwick University. In 1985, Richard Eder wrote in evaluating Thompson in the Los Angeles Times Book Review: “(He is) the kind of writer who, at his best, writes so well and demands so much of himself that besides dealing with ideas he personifies them.” On Saturday in Worcester, England, after a four-year illness.