Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was a Welsh scholar, novelist and critic.

Williams was born in Pandy, on the Welsh border, as the son of a railway signalman. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1974 to 1983 he was Professor of Drama at Cambridge. His continuing concern was culture and society. A socialist, in the 1950s he joined forces with E. P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, Ralph Miliband, Stuart Hall and John Saville to launch two radical journals, The New Reasoner and the New Left Review. Williams had an acute sense of cultural crisis, a feeling that the renowned split between self and world which is supposed to have happened in the later nineteenth century was a belated symptom rather than a version of the crisis itself. His most renown book is, without doubt, Border Country (1960).