Raymond
Williams, the son of a railway signalman, was born in Wales in 1921.
Educated at Abergavenny Grammar School and Trinity
College, Cambridge, his studies
were interrupted by the Second World War. He
joined the British
Army and saw
service as an anti-tank captain.
After
the war he worked in adult education before becoming a lecturer at
Cambridge University. A socialist, in
the 1950s he joined forces with E. P. Thompson,
Raphael
Samuel, Ralph
Miliband, Stuart
Hall and John Saville to launch two radical journals, The
New Reasoner and the New Left
Review.
Williams wrote extensively
about the history of culture. Books by Williams include Culture
and Society 1780-1960 (1958), The
Long Revolution (1961), Keywords
(1976), Communications (1962),
Second Generation (1964), Orwell
(1971), The Country and the City
(1973), Television: Technology and Cultural
Form (1974), Marxism and Literature
(1977), The Volunteers
(1978), Problems in Materialism and Culture
(1980), Culture (1981), Writings
in Society (1983) and Loyalties
(1985).
Raymond
Williams died in
1988.
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