47 Facts About Raymond Williams

Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture.

Raymond Williams's work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.

Raymond Williams's father was secretary of the local Labour Party, but Raymond declined to join, although he did attend meetings around the 1935 general election.

Raymond Williams 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.

Raymond Williams was a pacifist at this time, having distributed leaflets for the Peace Pledge Union.

Raymond Williams won a state scholarship to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1939.

Raymond Williams took a second in part one of the tripos in 1941, and, after returning from war service, achieved first-class honours in part two in 1946.

Raymond Williams graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA degree in 1946: as per tradition, his BA was promoted to a Master of Arts degree.

Raymond Williams was later awarded a higher doctorate by Cambridge; the Doctor of Letters degree in 1969.

Raymond Williams interrupted his education to serve in the Second World War.

Raymond Williams enlisted in the British Army in late 1940, but stayed at Cambridge to take his exams in June 1941, the month when Germany invaded Russia.

When Raymond Williams joined the army, he was assigned to the Royal Corps of Signals, which was a typical assignment for university undergraduates.

Raymond Williams received initial training in military communications, but was reassigned to artillery and anti-tank weapons.

Raymond Williams never discovered what happened to them as a withdrawal of troops ensued.

Raymond Williams took part in the fighting from Normandy in 1944 and through Belgium and the Netherlands to Germany in 1945.

Raymond Williams 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.

Raymond Williams 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.

Raymond Williams returned to Cambridge, where he found that the student culture had changed from 1941, with the left-wing involvement much diminished.

Raymond 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.

Raymond Williams published Reading and Criticism in 1950; he joined the Editorial Board of the new journal Essays in Criticism.

Raymond Williams refused to go, registering as a conscientious objector.

Raymond Williams 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.

Raymond Williams wrote a number of novels in this period, but only one, Border Country, would be published.

Eliot's 1948 publication Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Raymond Williams began exploring the concept of culture.

Raymond Williams 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.

Raymond Williams's writings were taken up by the New Left and received a wide readership.

Raymond Williams was well known as a regular book reviewer for The Manchester Guardian newspaper.

Raymond Williams eventually achieved an appointment in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, first as Reader in Drama, and then as the University's first Professor of Drama.

Raymond Williams 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.

Raymond Williams's tightly written Marxism and Literature is mainly for specialists, but 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 Raymond 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.

Raymond Williams makes much use of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, though the book is uniquely Williams's and written in his characteristic voice.

Raymond Williams was keen to establish the changing meanings of the vocabulary used in discussions of culture.

Raymond Williams 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.

Raymond Williams wrote that the Oxford English Dictionary "is primarily philological and etymological," whilst his work was on "meanings and contexts".

In 1981, Raymond 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".

Raymond Williams wrote critically of Marshall McLuhan's writings on technology and society.

Later, Raymond Williams was interested in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, although he found it too pessimistic about the possibilities for social change.

Raymond 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.

Raymond Williams retired from Cambridge in 1983 and spent his last years in Saffron Walden.

Raymond 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.

Raymond Williams 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 Raymond Williams, then published in two volumes with a postscript briefly describing what the remainder would have been.

Raymond Williams concluded that with many different societies in the world, there would be not one, but many socialisms.

The Raymond Williams Society was founded in 1989 "to support and develop intellectual and political projects in areas broadly connected with Williams's work".

Similar projects building on Raymond 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 Raymond Williams's papers was deposited at Swansea University by his daughter Merryn, a poet and author.