A ground-breaking work exploring how culture developed in the West. Relevant and readable more than fifty years after its first publication
Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of
Pandy, and was educated at the village school, at Abergavenny
Grammar School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After serving in
the war as an anti-tank captain, he became an adult education tutor
in the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies. In 1947
he was an editor of Politics and Letters, and in the 1960s was
general editor of the New Thinker's Library. He was elected Fellow
of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1961 and was later appointed
University Professor of Drama.
His books include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution
(1961) and its sequel Towards 2000 (1983); Communications (1962)
and Television- Technology and Cultural Form (1974); Drama in
Performance (1954), Modern Tragedy (1966) and Drama from Ibsen to
Brecht (1968); The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970),
Orwell (1971) and The Country and the City (1973); Politics and
Letters (interviews) (1979) and Problems in Materialism and Culture
(selected essays) (1980); and four novels - the Welsh trilogy of
Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for
Manod (1979), and The Volunteers (1978).
Raymond Williams was married in 1942, had three children, and
divided his time between Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, and Wales.
He died in 1988.
He was the foremost political thinker of his generation in Britain
who in his most formidable books, Culture And Society, The Long
Revolution and The Country And The Town, redrew the map of our
cultural history, and elsewhere made heroic interventions in the
main political debates of his time
*Guardian*
For those who read English in the '60s, it was common to revere
Williams as both a rock of integrity and a pathfinder for new ways
of seeing culture, communication, class and democracy
*Independent*
Brave, intelligent, and disciplined...a most impressive work
*C. P. Snow*
Penetrating, lucid, objective, and also honestly engaged...the best
reasoned plea that I have read for a common culture
*Angus Wilson*
Brilliantly intelligent...a good critic and also an original
thinker
*Stuart Hampshire*
Of quite radical importance...mature seriousness and unflagging
candour...magnificent
*Frank Kermode*
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