One of Britain's finest scholars, Raymond Henry Williams, was born on August 31, 1921 in a small Welsh village. When Raymond was 18 years old he won a scholarship to Cambridge. He accepted the scholarship and went to college at Cambridge where he was active in the student branch of the Communist Party and the Cambridge University Socialist Club. In 1941 he had to leave college to fight in WW2 where he was a tank commander. In 1946 he returned safely to Cambridge to finish his education and receive his degree in English.
After he graduated from college, Raymond worked as a lecturer for adult education for the next 14 years at Oxford University. During this time he published two important works, Culture and Society 1780-1950 in 1958, and The Long Revolution in 1961. Right after he wrote The Long Revolution he was appointed Lecturer in English at Cambridge. In 1974 he accepted the position of Professor of Drama at Cambridge where he was an historian of drama as well as a playwright.
The concerns of Raymond Williams are summarized in Culture and Society 1780-1950 using his key terms of industry, democracy, class, art, and culture. He was preoccupied with the relationship between culture and ideology. In the 1960s he participated in many TV discussion programs and two of his plays were broadcast on TV. For him the medium of television was a crucial cultural form, unlike most academics, as relevant to education as the printed word.
The Long Revolution was one of Williams's two or three most important and most enduring works. This publication made a substantial contribution to the production of modern cultural studies in general and advanced his politics, joining culture and democracy. The Long Revolution looks forward to the next decade and suggests that we are living through a long revolution that is simultaneously economic, political, and cultural.
Raymond Williams was a man who was ahead of his time. He was doing cultural studies even before the term was invented. He had a very successful life and accomplished a lot. He wrote more than 650 publications over his 40-year career. His contribution to cultural thinking was that of a Cambridge professor who never forgot the Welsh village where he grew up. On January 26, 1988 the world mourned the loss of one of the world's best social thinkers and intellectuals.
References:
Raymond Williams, http://www.newschool.edu/mediastudies/tv/channel7/links/bio1.html
Williams, Raymond, http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/W/htmlW/williamsray/williamsray.htm
Theorists and Critics, http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vwsu/gened/learn-modules/top_culture/culture-definitions/raymond-williams.html
Definitions and Discussions of Culture; http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definitions/raymond-williams.html
Williams, Raymond; http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/raymond_williams.html
Written by Alex Barnett, 2003
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007