The Dark Side of Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas was a well known poet. Different people had different views on his work. Dylan Thomas wrote many short stories, an uncompleted novel called Adventures in Skin Trade, the radio play called Under Milk Wood, three prose dramas, and many film scripts. He also wrote book reviews, radio talks, and descriptive essays, many of them collected in the volume called Quite Early One Morning published after his death (Korg 1).

In The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, It says, Dylan Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, where he spent his days growing up in Swansea, South Whales. His father was an English teacher at the grammar school. Dylan Thomas left the school in 1931 to go write on his own instead of going to college. In 1933, Dylan Thomas was “discovered” as a poet by winning a poetry contest in a popular newspaper (Thomas, English 2444). In 1934, at the age of twenty he published his first book called 18 Poems. That same year he then moved to London and several other villages where he started drinking a lot. In 1936, he met Caitlin Macnamara, a young Irishwoman, who had a bad temperament just like him and they got married and had three children. He supported himself in the last years in part with the long lecture tours of the United States, during which drunk or sober he gave great readings of poems on a dozen of college campuses (Thomas 101). His drinking gradually took up most of his time, which aided him in his early death in New York City (Thomas 102).

Donald Tritschler said this in his essay of Dylan Thomas’ Red Notebook, which Thomas filled at least four copybooks with poetry and one was called the Red Notebook with short stories by the time he was twenty. The ten stories in the Notebook ...

... middle of paper ...

...005): 39. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 July 2010.

Korg, Jacob. "Stories and Dramas." Dylan Thomas. Twayne

Publishers, 1992. Rpt. In Short Story Criticism. Ed. Justin Karr. Vol. 44. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 19 July 2010.

Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair. "Dylan

Thomas." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 101-10. Print.

Thomas, Dylan. "Dylan Thomas." The Norton Anthology of English

Literature. 8th ed. Vol. 2. New York, NY: Norton, 2006. 2444-2450. Print.

Tritschler, Donald. "The Stories in Dylan Thomas' Red

Notebook." Journal of Modern Literature 2.1 (Sept. 1971): 33-56. Rpt. In Short Story Criticism. Ed. Justin Karr. Vol. 44. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 19 July 2010.