Early life Born in
Pandy, just north of
Llanfihangel Crucorney, near
Abergavenny, Wales, Williams was the son of a railway worker in a village where all of the railwaymen voted
Labour, while the local small farmers mostly voted
Liberal. It was not a Welsh-speaking area: he described it as "Anglicised in the 1840s". There was, nevertheless, a strong Welsh identity. "There is the joke that someone says his family came over with the Normans and we reply: 'Are you liking it here?'" Williams attended
King Henry VIII Grammar School in
Abergavenny. His teenage years were overshadowed by the rise of
Nazism and the threat of war. His father was secretary of the local Labour Party, but Raymond declined to join, although he did attend meetings around the
1935 general election. He was 14 when the
Spanish Civil War broke out, and was conscious of what was happening through his membership of the local
Left Book Club. He also mentions the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (
Ethiopia) and
Edgar Snow's
Red Star Over China, originally published in Britain by the Left Book Club. At this time, he supported the
League of Nations, attending a League-organised youth conference in Geneva in 1937. On the way back, his group visited Paris and he went to the Soviet pavilion at the
International Exhibition. There he bought a copy of
The Communist Manifesto and read
Karl Marx for the first time. In July 1939, he was involved in the
Monmouth by-election, helping with an unsuccessful campaign by the Labour candidate, Frank Hancock, who was a
pacifist. Williams was also a pacifist at this time, having distributed leaflets for the
Peace Pledge Union.
University education Williams won a
state scholarship to read English at
Trinity College, Cambridge,
matriculating in 1939. He graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA degree in 1946: as per tradition, his BA was promoted to a
Master of Arts (MA Cantab) degree. He was later awarded a
higher doctorate by Cambridge: the
Doctor of Letters (LittD) degree in 1969. He was shocked to find that
Hamburg had suffered
saturation bombing by the
Royal Air Force, not just
military targets and docks, as they had been told. He was expecting to be sent to Burma, but as his studies had been interrupted by the war, was instead granted Class B release, which meant immediate demobilisation. He returned to Cambridge, where he found that the student culture had changed from 1941, with the left-wing involvement much diminished.
Adult education and early publications Williams received his BA from Cambridge in 1946, and then served as a tutor in
adult education at
Oxford University's
Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies (1946-1961). He expected to be jailed for a month, but the Appeal Tribunal panel, which included a professor of classics, was convinced by his case and discharged him from further military obligations in May 1951. Between 1946 and 1957, he was involved with the film-maker Michael Orrom, whom he had known in Cambridge. They co-wrote
Preface to Film, published in 1954, and Williams wrote the script for an experimental film,
The Legend, in 1955. This was rejected in July 1956 and he parted company with Orrom shortly afterwards. He wrote a number of novels in this period, but only one,
Border Country, would be published. Inspired by
T. S. Eliot's 1948 publication
Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Williams began exploring the concept of culture. He first outlined his argument that the concept emerged with the
Industrial Revolution in the essay "The Idea of Culture", which resulted in the widely successful book
Culture and Society, published in 1958, in which he coined the term
structure of feeling. This was followed in 1961 by
The Long Revolution. Williams's writings were taken up by the
New Left and received a wide readership. He was also well known as a regular book reviewer for
The Manchester Guardian newspaper. His years in adult education were an important experience and Williams was always something of an outsider at Cambridge University. Asked to contribute to a book called
My Cambridge, he began his essay by saying: "It was not my Cambridge. That was clear from the beginning."
Academic career On the strength of his books, Williams was invited to return to Cambridge in 1961, where he was elected a fellow of
Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a visiting professor of political science at
Stanford University in 1973, an experience he used to effect in his still useful book
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974). A committed socialist, he was interested in the relations between
language, literature and society, and published many books, essays and articles on these and other issues. Among the main ones is
The Country and the City (1973), where chapters on literature alternate with chapters on social history. His tightly written
Marxism and Literature (1977) is mainly for specialists, but also sets out his approach to
cultural studies, which he called cultural materialism. The book was in part a response to
structuralism in literary studies and pressure on Williams to make a more theoretical statement of his position, against criticisms that it was a
humanist Marxism, based on unexamined assumptions about lived experience. He makes much use of the ideas of
Antonio Gramsci, though the book is uniquely Williams's and written in his characteristic voice. For a more accessible version, see
Culture (1981-1982), which develops an argument about
cultural sociology, which he hoped would become "a new major discipline". Introducing the US edition,
Bruce Robbins identifies it as "implicit self-critique" of Williams's earlier ideas, and a basis on which "to conceive the oppositionality of the critic in a permanently fragmented society".
Concepts and theory Vocabulary Williams was keen to establish the changing meanings of the vocabulary used in discussions of culture. He began with the word
culture itself; his notes on 60 significant, often difficult words were to have appeared as an appendix to
Culture and Society in 1958. This was not possible, and so an extended version with notes and short essays on 110 words appeared as
Keywords in 1976. Those examined included "aesthetic", "bourgeois", "culture", "hegemony", "isms", "organic", "romantic", "status", "violence" and "work". A revised version in 1983 added 21 new words, including "anarchism", "ecology", "liberation" and "sex". Williams wrote that the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) "is primarily philological and etymological," whilst his work was on "meanings and contexts". In 1981, Williams published
Culture, where the term, discussed at length, is defined as "a
realized signifying system" and supported by chapters on "the means of cultural production, and the process of cultural reproduction". Williams explored the word "freedom" in a short essay reviewing
The Concept of Freedom by
Christopher Caudwell (St John Sprigg), and in contrast,
George Orwell, both as comrades in the
Spanish Civil War. Williams remarks that what Caudwell has to say about freedom is clearly said: that men are free through their social relations, and in escape from them, or in the illusion of escape. Williams continues: "in this sense it was right to organise this selection around this title: it is at any rate here that I feel closest to him, and farthest from [George] Orwell."
Debate Williams wrote critically of
Marshall McLuhan's writings on technology and society. This is the background to a chapter in
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) called "The Technology and the Society", where Williams defended his visions against
technological determinism, focusing on the prevalence of social over technological in the development of human processes. Thus "Determination is a real social process, but never (as in some theological and some Marxist versions)... a wholly controlling, wholly predicting set of causes. On the contrary, the reality of determination is the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures, within which variable social practices are profoundly affected but never necessarily controlled." His book
Modern Tragedy may be read as a response to
The Death of Tragedy by the conservative literary critic
George Steiner. Later, Williams was interested in the work of
Pierre Bourdieu, although he found it too pessimistic about the possibilities for social change.
Last years Williams joined the Labour Party after he moved to Cambridge in 1961, but resigned in 1966 after the new majority Labour government had broken the seafarers' strike and introduced public expenditure cuts. He joined the
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and wrote the May Day Manifesto (published 1967), along with
Edward Thompson and
Stuart Hall. Williams later became a
Plaid Cymru member and a Welsh nationalist. He retired from Cambridge in 1983 and spent his last years in
Saffron Walden. While there he wrote
Loyalties, a novel about a fictional group of upper-class radicals attracted to 1930s Communism. Williams was working on
People of the Black Mountains, an experimental historical novel about people who lived or might have lived around the
Black Mountains, his own part of Wales, told through flashbacks featuring an ordinary man in modern times, looking for his grandfather, who has not returned from a hill-walk. He imagines the region as it was and might have been. The story begins in the
Paleolithic, and would have come up to modern times, focusing on ordinary people. He had completed it to the
Middle Ages by the time he died in 1988. The whole work was prepared for publication by his wife, Joy Williams, then published in two volumes with a
postscript briefly describing what the remainder would have been. Almost all the stories were complete in typescript, mostly revised many times by the author. Only "The Comet" was left incomplete and needed small additions for a continuous narrative. In the 1980s, Williams made important links to debates on feminism, peace,
ecology and social movements, and extended his position beyond what might be recognised as
Marxism. He concluded that with many different societies in the world, there would be not one, but many socialisms. Influenced partly by critical readings of
Sebastiano Timpanaro and
Rudolf Bahro, he called for convergence between the labour movement and what was then called the ecology movement. The Raymond Williams Society was founded in 1989 "to support and develop intellectual and political projects in areas broadly connected with Williams's work". Since 1998 it has published
Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, which is "committed to developing the tradition of cultural materialism" he originated. The Raymond Williams Centre for Recovery Research opened at Nottingham Trent University in 1995. The Raymond Williams Foundation (RWF) supports activities in adult education; In 2024 the Raymond Williams Foundation offers grants and in 2022 celebrated Williams' centenary. The Foundation was originally formed in 1988 as the Raymond Williams Memorial Fund. A collaborative research project building on Williams's investigation of cultural keywords called the "Keywords Project", initiated in 2006, is supported by Jesus College, University of Cambridge, and the University of Pittsburgh. Similar projects building on Williams's legacy include the 2005 publication,
New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by the cultural-studies scholars
Tony Bennett,
Lawrence Grossberg, and
Meaghan Morris, and the
Keywords series from New York University Press including
Keywords for American Cultural Studies. In 2007 a collection of Williams's papers was deposited at
Swansea University by his daughter Merryn, a poet and author. == Works ==