Dylan Thomas: The biography - Hardcover

Paul-ferris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0460879707 ISBN 13: 9780460879705

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999

Synopsis

Dylan Thomas's life is almost a blueprint for the life of a bohemian poet. Born in Swansea in 1914, he knew both acclaim and despair in his lifetime, and died amid alcohol and debts in New York at the age of thirty nine. He lived his life flamboyant and self centred almost as if he had future biographers in mind. It is hard sometimes to separate the truth from myth, and to put his life into its artistic and historical context. Paul Ferris's biography, first published in 1977 (Hodder & Stoughton), is regarded by many as the definitive account. As the editor of Thomas's collected letters, Paul Ferris had access to many of the intimate sources and, since Caitlin Thomas's death in 1992, he has discovered ninety unpublished letters, many to Caitlin herself, which shed new light on Thomas's life, work and death.

About this title

Review:

This new edition of Paul Ferris's perceptive biography, which was originally published in 1977, is primarily notable for its frank portrait of the poet's marriage to Caitlin Macnamara Thomas, who died in 1994. "The essential truth about the Dylan-Caitlin relationship," Ferris writes, "was that his dependent nature left him vulnerable in later years when his wife withdrew her affection and became blatantly promiscuous." Yet the author is not unsympathetic to Caitlin, whose biography he wrote in 1993. The accounts of Thomas's raucous, drunken visits to America, where he died in 1953 at age 39, will certainly incline readers to forgive anything his wife did in revenge. The book's principal strengths remain what they were in 1977: a knowledgeable, in-depth account of the poet's childhood in Wales (Ferris himself was born a mile from Thomas's childhood home); a lucid disentangling of myth from fact in both interviews and contemporary sources; and a sensitive understanding that "behind the public cavortings was a private agony." This is Ferris's real subject, the agony of a boy who was "pretty ... spoiled ... the darling of the family," and who never managed to grow up enough to create a life that would support his poetic gifts. It's a sad story but a fascinating one. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Paul Ferris was born in Swansea in 1929. He is the author of an acclaimed biography of Caitlin Thomas and the editor of The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas (Dent).

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0460879707
• ISBN 13: 9780460879705
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 408