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Dylan Marlais Thomas was born at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the Uplands district of Swansea,
Wales, on October 27, 1914. Before his birth, Thomas's parents, David John (D. J.)
and
Florence Hannah, had moved to the primarily Anglophone suburb from rural Welsh-speaking
Carmarthenshire. Although both D. J. and Florence were bilingual, they raised Dylan
and his
sister Nancy to speak only English, even sending the children to elocution lessons. |
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Dylan was an unremarkable student at the local grammar school in Swansea where his
father
taught English. Given unlimited access to his father's library at home, however, he
engaged
a precocious interest in English literature and began composing poetry, publishing
some of
it in school magazines. At sixteen, he left school to work for the local evening paper
as a
reporter. Journalism proved an unsuitable occupation for Thomas, and he quit the following
year. |
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Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, Thomas kept a series of notebooks (now at
the
Lockwood Memorial Library in Buffalo) in which he developed the
challenging and dense style of his earliest adult poetry. As a teenager his poems
were
published in New Verse and in the Sunday Referee's " Poets' Corner." In 1934, Thomas received the "
Poets'
Corner" Prize, an award that included the publication of a first book of
poetry. |
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During the mid-1930s--the years between the publication of his first two volumes of
poetry,
18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936)--Thomas embedded himself in the London
artistic scene, earning a reputation as a poet, drinker, and storyteller. Sometime
in 1936,
Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, an aspiring dancer and former mistress of
the painter Augustus John. The following year they eloped in Penzance,
Cornwall. The couple were penniless and often lived off the money and housing they
could
borrow from family and friends. Shortly before Caitlin learned she was pregnant with
their
first child, Llewelyn, they moved to the Carmarthenshire fishing village of Laugharne. |
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During the war years, Thomas managed to avoid military service, probably on medical
grounds. He moved between Laugharne and London, having secured work as a scriptwriter
for
Donald Taylor's Strand Films, a contractor for
the Ministry of Information. Thomas's lifestyle in wartime London was relatively controlled
and predictable; for the first time since his teenage foray into journalism, he was
earning
a steady income. |
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Following the war, however, Thomas's life became more chaotic. Deaths and Entrances (1946), a pocket-sized volume of poems in a
more accessible style, was an immediate success. Despite this, Thomas's domestic life
grew
more problematic: he and Caitlin were struggling to support two children (daughter
Aeronwy
was born in 1943), and the pair's relationship was becoming increasingly dysfunctional.
Thomas no longer had the steady income from his wartime documentaries, and he began
to rely
instead on income from scriptwriting for feature films and radio broadcasts for the
BBC. In 1949, the Thomases moved back to Wales and into the Boat
House, a property in Laugharne purchased for them by their benefactor Margaret
Taylor. In July of that year, a third child, Colm, was born. |
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In 1949 John Malcolm Brinnin, director of the Poetry Center at the
Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association in New York, invited Thomas to visit
the
United States and cash in on his growing fame in America. He traveled there in 1950,
giving
readings at the Poetry Center and at college campuses as far west as San Francisco
and
Vancouver. |
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Three more American tours followed, one in 1952 and two in 1953. By this time, Thomas
had
been drafting for several years a play for voices about a day in the life of Llareggub,
a
fictional Welsh town with a backwards-reading name. During his third American tour,
Thomas
more or less finished the play, by then titled Under Milk Wood, and it was first performed on stage at Harvard
University in May 1953. Under Milk Wood would
posthumously become his best-known work. |
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Meanwhile, Thomas's health and marriage were deteriorating; years of heavy drinking
were
exacting a cumulative toll. As he began his fourth and final American tour in October
1953,
his marriage appeared to be unsalvageable, and Thomas succumbed to despair. He began
a
regimen of self-destructive behavior, drinking copiously and often to the point of
delirium.
On November 4, after a doctor's well-intentioned but ultimately fatal injection of
morphine,
Thomas collapsed and fell into a coma. He died on November 9, 1953, at St. Vincent's
Hospital in New York City. |
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