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Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters Volume 1: 1931-1939

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters Volume 1: 1931-1939
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Dylan Thomas
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:512
Dimensions(mm): Height 231,Width 154
Category/GenreLiterary studies - from c 1900 -
Literary studies - poetry and poets
ISBN/Barcode 9781474607995
ClassificationsDewey:821.912
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Orion Publishing Co
Imprint Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publication Date 14 September 2017
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

Dylan Thomas's letters bring the fascinating and tempestuous poet and his times to life in a way that no biography can. The letters begin in the poet's schooldays and end just before his death in New York at the age of 39. In between, he loved, wrote, drank, begged and borrowed his way through a flamboyant life. He was an enthusiastic critic of other writers' work and the letters are full of his thoughts on the work of his contemporaries, from T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden to Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. A lifetime of letters tell a remarkable story, each taking the reader a little further along the path of the poet's self-destruction, but written with such verve and lyricism that somehow the reader's sympathies never quite abandon him.

Author Biography

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea on 27 October 1914, the son of a senior English master. On leaving school he worked on the South Wales Evening Post before embarking on his literary career in London. Not only a poet, he wrote short stories, film scripts, features and radio plays, the most famous being UNDER MILK WOOD and A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES. On 9 November 1953, shortly after his thirty-ninth birthday, Dylan Thomas died in New York city. He is buried in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, which had become his main home since 1949. In 1982 a memorial stone to commemorate him was unveiled in 'Poet's Corner' in Westminster Abbey.

Reviews

Dylan Thomas's life and letters read like a cry of despair, interspersed with rare moments of happiness in Wales . . . A moving book. The pain is too real, the tragedy too pitiful to leave any reader untouched - Sunday Times His letters are as funny, and nearly as witty, as Oscar Wilde's, and sometimes almost as wise as Keats's - Sunday Telegraph