Williams, Raymond

Williams, Raymond (1921–88), critic and novelist, born in Pandy, near Abergavenny. His studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, were interrupted by wartime service in an anti-tank regiment. He taught first as an adult education tutor in Sussex from 1946 to 1961, then at Cambridge. His best-known book, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958), surveys the history of the idea of ‘culture’ in British thought; and his later works, beginning with The Long Revolution (1961), extend this concept in more democratic directions than those envisaged by T. S. Eliot and others, examining television and other modern forms of communication, as well as the history and sociology of drama and fiction. More traditional literary studies include The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970) and The Country and the City (1974). A leading figure of the British ‘New Left’, he tried to move beyond the limits of previous Marxist literary criticism into a more dynamic, materialist view of cultural changes, explored in Marxism and Literature (1977) and other books. His semi-autobiographical early novels include Border Country (1960) and Second Generation (1964).