Blurring the distinctions between traditional academic boundaries, while focusing attention on aspects of culture usually silenced by the dominant society, Raymond Williams was a pervasively influential twentieth-century thinker. In more than thirty published books, and in hundreds of articles, Williams addressed questions of culture, communication, politics, literature, and drama. Working outside mainstream communication research agendas, two of Williams's books, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), became foundational texts in the development of a new political and intellectual tradition known today as British cultural studies.

Williams, born in Pandy, Wales, was the only son of Henry Joseph Williams and Esther Gwen-dolene Williams (neé Bird). He was raised in a socialist, working-class household; his father was a railway signalman, the son of a farm laborer, and his mother was the daughter of a farm bailiff. Williams attended the local elementary school, and when he was...