The importance of Gwyn Thomas is indicated by the Welsh historian David Smith, in a memorial tribute published in 1982: "More than any other writer of the twentieth century, Gwyn Thomas captured the significance of the majority Welsh experience. His novels and plays, so deliberately removed in style from a naturalistic mode, form a rich, often devastating, commentary on an industrial South Wales whose culture he had seen flourish and wither in his own lifetime." Smith adds that Thomas was never simply "a regional novelist," for although his theme might be localize, it always concerned the "human working out of human dilemmas"--an assertion supported by the success of Thomas's novels in America.

The main subject, as well as the setting, of most of Thomas's fiction is the Rhondda valleys of Wales in the 1930s and 1940s, but despite this uniform setting, his novels are by no means unvarying...