Short answers, pulled from the story.
Raymond Williams (the 31st of August 1921 - the 26th of January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist, and critic whose work laid the foundations for the fields of cultural studies and cultural materialism. He coined the term "structure of feeling" and produced books translated into multiple languages, with some 750,000 copies sold in UK editions alone.
Williams was born in Pandy, just north of Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny in Wales. His father was a railway worker and secretary of the local Labour Party. He won a state scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1939.
Williams served as an officer in the Anti-Tank Regiment of the Guards Armoured Division from 1941 to 1945. He fought in the D-Day landings in Normandy, then through Belgium and the Netherlands into Germany, where his unit helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp.
Keywords, published in 1976, contains notes and short essays on 110 words significant to discussions of culture, including "aesthetic", "bourgeois", "hegemony", and "work". A revised edition in 1983 added 21 new entries including "anarchism", "ecology", and "sex". Williams distinguished his project from the Oxford English Dictionary by focusing on "meanings and contexts" rather than philology.
Williams was elected a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge in 1961. He served as Reader in Drama from 1967 to 1974, then became the university's first Professor of Drama from 1974 to 1983. Cambridge also awarded him a Doctor of Letters (LittD) degree in 1969.
Cultural materialism is Williams's approach to analysing culture as a material social practice rather than as a set of ideas floating above economic life. He set out the approach in Marxism and Literature (1977), drawing on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci while responding to structuralism. He defined culture in his 1981-1982 book Culture as "a realized signifying system".