This site contains a brief biography of Thomas, a selected bibliography, the texts of several of his poems, and a list of links.

BIOGRAPHY
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). Born in Swansea, Wales, Thomas decided to pursue a writing career directly after grammar school. At age twenty, he published his first collection, Eighteen Poems (1934), but his lack of a university degree deprived him of most opportunities to earn a living as a writer in England. Consequently, his early life (as well as the lives of his wife and children) was darkened by a poverty compounded by his free spending and heavy drinking.

A self-proclaimed romanticist, Thomas called his poetry a "record of [his] struggle from darkness towards some measure of light." The Map of Love appeared in 1939 and Deaths and Entrances in 1946. Later, as a radio playwright and screenwriter, Thomas delighted in the sounds of words, sometimes at the expense of sense. Under Milk Wood (produced in 1953) is filled with his private, onomatopoetic language.

He suffered from alcoholism and lung ailments, and died in a New York hospital in 1953. Earlier that year, he noted in his Collected Poems: "These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't."