Second Generation

Second Generation

Summary

In this challenging novel, where striking workers march among dreaming spires, the worlds of industry and learning collide as the Owen family are caught in a web of conflicts: of politics and sex, loyalty and independence, English lives and Welsh memories . Harold Owen and his brother Gwyn carved out a place for themselves when they came to work in a car factory in a university city – but the calm of their lives is threatened when Harold’s wife Kate makes a bid for independence, while a clash of values in work, politics and love confront their son Peter. How can the second generation, facing the start of the turbulent 1960s – create a future which will not destroy their past?

Reviews

  • His complex character, indeed his whole life, was held together by two qualities - scholarship and political conviction - which made him a major influence on three decades of political thought
    Independent

About the author

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy, and was educated at the village school, at Abergavenny Grammar School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After serving in the war as an anti-tank captain, he became an adult education tutor in the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies. In 1947 he was an editor of Politics and Letters, and in the 1960s was general editor of the New Thinker’s Library. He was elected Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1961 and was later appointed Professor of Drama.

His books include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961) and its sequel Towards 2000 (1983); Communications (1962) and Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974); Drama in Performance (1954), Modern Tragedy (1966) and Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968); The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), Orwell (1971) and The Country and the City (1973); Politics and Letters (interviews) (1979) and Problems in Materialism and Culture (selected essays) (1980); and four novels – the Welsh trilogy of Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for Manod (1979), and The Volunteers (1978).

Raymond Williams was married in 1942, had three children, and divided his time between Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, and Wales. He died in 1988.
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