In the breadth of his subject matter and the scope of his work--which includes twenty novels, in excess of a hundred short stories, two topographic books on Wales, a biography, and a play--it is not unreasonable to claim for Rhys Davies the title of Wales's greatest twentieth-century prose writer. That he is not generally recognized as such, least of all in his own land, is due in part to the "outsiderdom" that he deliberately cultivated and to his almost lifelong residence in London, divorced from the rather incestuous currents of Welsh literary life.

Davies was born on 9 November 1901 (not 1903, as he was given to claiming) in Clydach Vale, a tributary valley of the Rhondda rising steeply at right angles from the town of Tonypandy. His father, Thomas Rees Davies, was the son of an illiterate Merthyr collier. Both of Thomas's parents had died during his childhood, and he...