William Morris

Born in 1834 to Essex wealth, Morris fell hard for medieval romance at Oxford and never quite left it. He married Jane Burden, befriended the Pre-Raphaelites, and in 1861 opened a decorative arts firm with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and architect Philip Webb that remade Victorian interiors - tapestries, stained glass, fabrics, furniture. From a rented manor in Oxfordshire he translated Icelandic sagas, wrote fantasy epics like The Earthly Paradise and the utopian News from Nowhere, and grew steadily more radical. Reading Marx in the 1880s, he became a revolutionary socialist, founded the Socialist League, and spent his final years at the Kelmscott Press, printing limited-edition books as beautiful as any medieval scriptorium's. He died in 1896, better known then for poetry than for the designs that outlasted him.