Although Edward Thomas's critical reputation is based on his achievement as a poet, that achievement represents a brief flowering at the end of a career as a writer of prose. For more than twenty years Thomas wrote prose of all sorts: essays, reviews, introductions to anthologies, travel books, critical and biographical studies, a fragmentary autobiography (The Childhood of Edward Thomas, 1938), a novel (The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, 1913), and an unfinished second novel (under the working title "Fiction"). It is a prodigious and uneven output, and the prodigiousness and unevenness have unfortunately led to a concensus that dismisses Thomas's prose as hackwork. Yet as Thomas's biographer R. George Thomas has remarked in his introduction to Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley (1968), "Read in conjunction with his books, these letters cast serious doubt on the use of the description 'hack-writing' that has slipped increasingly into much uninformed posthumous comment on his...