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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Dylan Thomas
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(1914–53)
Welsh poet, born in Swansea, who developed a double reputation, for his romantic poems (much influenced by *Hopkins) and for his bucolic lifestyle – as seen in London's drinking clubs and on his four tours of the USA. Many of his best-known poems, including 'Fern Hill' and 'In my Craft or Sullen Art', were published in Deaths and Entrances (1946). *'Do not go gentle into that good night' was included in his much reprinted Collected Poems (1952).
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940, echoing James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1915) is a collection of autobiographical short stories; they demonstrate the ability to find comedy and delight in a cast of everyday characters, which he later put to such good effect in his last work, *Under Milk Wood. He appeared in the first performance of this in New York in October 1953, and two weeks later died there of alcoholic poisoning.
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