Welsh critic, novelist, and theorist whose patient reworking of the word culture over forty years is the single most consequential thing any English-speaking writer of the 20th century did with it. Born in 1921 to a railway signalman in Pandy, on the Welsh side of the Black Mountains, he remained formed by that border country — between Welsh and English, rural and industrial, small community and metropolitan centre — and its doubled perspective runs through everything he wrote. After Cambridge, a tank commander's war in Normandy, and fifteen years in adult education with the Workers' Educational Association, he returned to Cambridge as a professor of drama; but the adult-education classroom, not the university, is the room his books imagine themselves being read in.
Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) traced the word culture as it mutated through Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Morris, Eliot, and Leavis — a genealogy that reclaimed a whole tradition of English cultural criticism for the democratic left and refused both Arnold's "the best that has been thought and said" and the Leavisite narrowing of culture to literature. Its 1958 companion essay "Culture is Ordinary" made the point flat: culture is not a possession of the educated but a "whole way of life" — meanings, habits, feelings — produced by everyone, and politics is the argument over which of those meanings get to count. The Long Revolution (1961) extended the argument; Keywords (1976) turned it into a pocket-sized political etymology of some 110 words the Left and Right fought over. His signature concept, "structure of feeling," names the not-yet-articulated affective tone of a period — what emergent cultures feel like before they can be named — and has proved remarkably durable.
In the 1970s, under the pressure of the New Left's encounter with continental theory, he deepened this project into cultural materialism: the argument, laid out in Marxism and Literature (1977), that culture is itself material production, not an ideological reflection of an economic base, and therefore a terrain of genuine political struggle. Alongside the criticism he wrote seven novels — Border Country (1960) is the best — and The Country and the City (1973) remains the classic English study of how rural nostalgia hides the history of enclosure and empire. With E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall he was a founder of the British New Left; with Hoggart and Thompson he gave British Cultural Studies its foundational texts. His readers run from Terry Eagleton to postcolonial critics to every serious British writer on class since.