Biography Essay

D. M. Thomas is widely known for his novel The White Hotel, which quickly rose to the top of the best-seller lists after its American publication in the spring of 1981. Yet, he is also an accomplished poet. In his poetry, as well as in his novels, he has developed a style that is a powerful evocation of the imaginative life.

A native of Carnkai, near Redruth, Cornwall, Donald Michael Thomas grew up in what he considered a "distinctive landscape with a spirit," and as part of a Methodist chapel-going family with a strong interest in America. An ancestor had lived briefly in New York, and Thomas's parents, Harold Redvers and Amy Thomas, had spent ten years in California, where his father, a plasterer, had built a house. The Cornish seacoast and abandoned tin mines of Thomas's childhood have been transformed into what he calls the "inner...