Emlyn Williams, playwright, actor, and director, has been a luminary in London's West End and on New York's Broadway since the late 1920s. His Night Must Fall (1935) is one of the most successful and chilling psychological thrillers of the modern stage. The Corn Is Green (1938) is an appealing, sympathetic drama of two strong people set against an authentic, lovingly drawn social background. His recreation in the 1950s of Charles Dickens's reading from his own works was a critical and popular success of no small proportions.

George Emlyn Williams was born in Mostyn, Flintshire, Wales, to a working-class family. His father had worked himself up from coal miner to greengrocer (he was eventually to be a foreman in an ironworks); his mother was a deeply religious woman of Calvinist bent. Not until he was ten and studying at the Holywell County School did he hear English spoken as a...