For the past thirty years Raymond Williams has been a major figure in the world of English letters. It is for his sociological criticism of literature that he is best known to intellectual circles and the universities. Because of a rare combination of right-of-center Marxism and a moral passion akin to that of F.R. Leavis, Williams's massive interdisciplinary output has commanded the respect of both the New Left and the traditional liberal literary establishment. It is not always realized that Williams is also a practicing novelist. He was writing novels before criticism, and he himself maintains that the writing of fiction will go on for longer than the analytical essays. Williams attaches great importance to his novels and has consistently denied that they occupy a secondary position in his literary work. While granting that the disproportion between his critical output and his fiction (a ratio of five...