Dylan Thomas

Born in 1914 in Swansea, Wales, in a semi-detached house on Cwmdonkin Drive, Dylan Thomas was the son of a grammar school English teacher who read Shakespeare aloud to him in the crib, and a seamstress mother who indulged him completely. He was a sickly, asthmatic child who showed little interest in school but began writing poems in earnest at fifteen, filling the notebooks that would yield some of his greatest work. His first collection, 18 Poems (1934), published when he was twenty, announced a voice of extraordinary verbal music and sensual intensity. He married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937, beginning a marriage of legendary passion and mutual destruction fueled by poverty and drink. Deaths and Entrances (1946) contained some of his finest lyrics, including "Fern Hill" and "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London." His radio play Under Milk Wood (1954), a daylong portrait of a small Welsh fishing village, became one of the most beloved works of English-language drama. Thomas undertook four reading tours of America between 1950 and 1953, performing to packed auditoriums and drinking on a scale that astonished even his hosts. On November 9, 1953, at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, he collapsed after reportedly declaring "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record." He died at St. Vincent's Hospital four days later, at thirty-nine.