Raymond Williams was one of Britain's greatest post­ war cultural historians, theorists, and polemicists. A distinguished literary and social thinker in the Left­ Leavisite tradition, he sought to understand literature and related cultural forms not as the outcome of an isolated aesthetic adventure, but as the manifestation of a deeply social process that involved a series of complex relationships between authorial ideology, institutional process, and generic/aesthetic form. Pioneering in the context of the British literary academy, these concerns are heralded in the brief-lived postwar journal Politics and Letters, which he co founded. Williams's theories are perhaps best summarized in his Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958; 2nd edition, 1983), his critical panorama of literary tradition from the romantics to George Orwell, predicated on the key terms "indus­try," "democracy,'' "class," "art," and "culture." This ideological sense of cultural etymology became the basis of his influential pocket dictionary Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976).

     Marked by a commitment to his class origins and his postwar experiences of adult education, Williams's efforts to expand the traditional curriculum for English also entailed an early engagement with the allied representational pressures of drama and cinema, in books such as Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952; 2nd revised edition as Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, 1968), Preface to Film (1954), Drama in Performance (1954; revised edition, 1968), and Modern Tragedy (1966; revised edition, 1979). His perception of the links between film and drama remains evident in his 1977 Screen essay on the politics of realism in Loach's TV film The Big Flame (1969), and in his historical introduction to James Curran and Vincent Porter's British Cinema History (1983).

     Williams's preoccupation with the relationships between ideology and culture, and the development of socialist perspectives in the communicative arts, was to continue in such works as The Long Revolution (1961; revised edition, 1966). May Day Manifesto 1968 (1968), The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), The Country and the City ( 1973), Marxism and Literature (1977), Problems in Materialism  and  Culture:  Selected   Essays  (1980),  Culture (1981). Towards 2000 (1982), Writing in Society(1983), Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (1989), and The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (1989). The Williams collection Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review ( 1981) provides a useful retrospective on his work.

     In the 1960s, Williams's work took on new dimensions. In 1960 he published his first, autobiographical novel, Border Country, which was to be followed by other works of fiction: Second Generation (1964). The Volunteers (1978), and The Fight for Manod (1979). In 1962, he published his first book to address directly the new world of contemporary mass media, Communications, an informative volume in the early history of media studies that has been influential in Great Britain and internationally. He moved to the center of left cultural politics, in the crucible of 1968, with his chairmanship of the Left National Committee and his edition of the May Day Manifesto 1968.

     Throughout the 1960s, Williams participated in what he remembered as innumerable TV discussion programs, as the young medium found its style. Two of his novels became TV plays, now sadly lost-a "live" version of A Letter from the Country (1966) and Public Inquiry (1967), filmed in his native Wales.

     From 1968 to 1972, Williams contributed a weekly column on TV to the BBC magazine The Listener. Now collected as Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings (1989), these writings illustrate his response to a wide range of TV themes and pleasures-from an enthusiasm for  television  sport  to a distrust in the medium's stress on "visibility," to arguments about the economic and political relationships between production and transmission.

     Williams went on to develop these ideas more formally in the book Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), one of the first major theoretical studies of the medium, which he wrote largely while on a visiting professorship at Stanford University in 1972. There he soaked up American TV, developed his influential concept of TV "flow," and encountered the newly emerging technologies of satellite and cable.

     In 1970 he had contributed a personal documentary, "Border Country," to the BBC series One Pair of Eyes, which was to be followed at the end of the decade by "The Country and The City: A Film with Raymond Williams," the last of five programs in the series Where We Live Now: Five Writers Look at Our Surroundings (1979). In the 1980s, he contributed to a trio of Open University/BBC programs-language in Use: "The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd" (1981), Society, Education, and the State: Worker, Scholar, and Citizen (1982), and The State and Society in 1984 (1984). He also appeared in Identity Ascendant: The Home Counties (1988), an episode in the HTV/Channel 4 series The Divided Kingdom, and in Big Words, Small Worlds (1987), Channel 4's record of the Strathclyde Linguistics of Writing Conference.

     Williams's contribution to cultural thinking was that of a Cambridge professor who never forgot the Welsh village of his childhood. He was a theorist of literature who himself wrote novels; a historian of drama who was also a playwright; and a commentator on TV and the mass media who himself regularly contributed to the television medium in a variety of ways. For him, unlike so many academics, the medium of television was a crucial cultural form, as relevant to education as the printed word. When Channel 4 began transmission in Great Britain in 1982, it was entirely appropriate that this innovative channel's opening feature film should be So That You Can Live, Cinema Action's elegy for the industrial decay of the Welsh valleys, explicitly influenced by the work of Williams, from whose work the film offers us readings.

     The Second International Television Studies Conference, held in London in 1986, was honored to appoint Williams as its co president, alongside Hilde Himmelweit. However, by the time the next event came round in 1988, the conference sadly honored not Williams's presence, but his passing. The breadth of his impact in the U.K. cultural arena can be gauged from the British Film Institute monograph Raymond Williams: Film/TV/Cinema (edited by David Lusted; 1989), produced to accompany a Williams memorial season at the National Film Theatre and containing a contribution by his widow.