Raymond Williams : His Life and Times

This is the first biography of Raymond Williams, who died in 1988 at the age of 66. Raymond Williams was known to thousands of people as a dedicated socialist, thinker and novelist with an absolute commitment to the good of all people.Raymond Williamsincludes conversations with numerous people who knew Williams, including Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, John Dunn, Terry Eagleton, Anthony Giddens, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm, Irving Howe, Frank Kermode, F.R. Leavis, Edward Said, Quention Skinner, Dorothy Thompson and Michael Walzer. During his years at Cambridge, Williams's principles led him to oppose the many ways Britain was disfigured by the class privilege and subsequent cruelty of late capitalism. At the same time he invested the subject of media studies with his theories about television, through his weekly practice as a television critic. In the 1960s, shocked by the lack of principle in the Wilson government, Raymond Williams became celebrated as national leader of intellectual andinformal dissent. He was transformed into a kind of folk hero unusual in 20th century Britain: the academic scholar and intellectual, the writer and private citizen who is also a well loved and greatly respected public figure. In his life, Raymond Williams played many parts: child of the Black Mountains, inspirational adult lecturer, Cambridge Professor, folk hero and guru of the Left. After his death, he remained a symbolic figure and his classic works--Culture and Society,The Long Revolution,The Country and the City--continue to inspire generations all over the world. In this first major biography, Fred Inglis has spoken to those who knew this complex and charismatic man at every stage of his life, from his boyhood years in the Welsh border country to his brief years of retirement. Through their voice and his own passionate and at times combative engagement with his subject, he tells of a story of a life not just for its time but for our own. After Thatcher andReagan, after the Cold War, Williams still has much to teach us about the nature of a good and just society and about the constant struggle to attain it.

Fred Inglis is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.