English textile designer, artist, writer, and libertarian socialist
1834 CE
to 1896 CE
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) is an English textile designer, artist, writer, and libertarian socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement.
He founds a design firm in partnership with the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti which profoundly influences the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century.
As an author, illustrator and medievalist, he helps to establish the modern fantasy genre, and is a direct influence on postwar authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien.
He is also a major contributor to reviving traditional textile arts and methods of production, and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, now a statutory element in the preservation of historic buildings in the UK.
Morris writes and publishes poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life.
His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball (1888), the utopian News from Nowhere (1890), and the fantasy romance The Well at the World's End (1896).
He is an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with that organization over goals and methods by the end of the decade.
He devotes much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press, which he founds in 1891.
Kelmscott is devoted to the publishing of limited-edition, illuminated-style print books.
The 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is considered a masterpiece of book design.
