This edition celebrates the centenary of Williams's birth.
RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921-1998) was the most influential
socialist writer and thinker in post-war Britain. Now, for the
first time, making full use of Williams's private and unpublished
papers and by placing him in a wide social and cultural
landscape, Dai Smith, in this highly original and much praised
biography, uncovers how Williams's life to 1961 is an explanation
of his immense intellectual achievement.
"It is Smith's ambition to set out the lonely, almost monastic path
Raymond took through childhood, army and adult education
towards his deserved eminence. But the biographer's greatest
achievement is to find his own discerning route through what
often seems to be a jungle of contradiction... This is a worthwhile
book and a very good one."
- David Hare, The Guardian
"It is a remarkable piece of work and will henceforth be essential
to the understanding of the making of Raymond Williams."
- Eric Hobsbawm
"Becomes at once the authoritative account... Smith has done all
that we can ask the historian as biographer to do."
- Stefan Collini, London Review of Books
"Carrying an impressive deal of intensive research lightly... the
portraiture throughout is graphic, richly detailed and subtly
shaded... in these packed, lucidly written pages..."
- Terry Eagleton, New Welsh Review