Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was the most influential socialist intellectual in post-war Britain.

Using a rich array of material from Raymond Williams's hitherto unused personal papers - juvenilia, diaries, letters, unpublished novels and stories, notebooks, work drafts and fragments - Dai Smith takes us through the formative years on the Welsh Border as the son of a railway signalman and his wife, on to Cambridge in 1939 and War service in Normandy, to show in telling detail how the making of Culture and Society (1958) and the writing of his novel Border Country (1960) was all of a piece in the conceptual breakthrough he strove to make in the 1950s.The meaning of Raymond Williams is revealed in his making. This biography places its central figure within a deeply researched social and cultural history so that we can see again, as Raymond Williams insisted we should that culture is "a whole way of life".