SOURCE: “Thomas, Alun Lewis,” in The Short Story in English, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1981, pp. 299-305.

In the following essay, Allen discusses Lewis's story “The Wanderers,” which Allen considers his best story.

A South Wales man, Alun Lewis was killed in an accident while on active service in India in 1943. He was then a lieutenant in the South Wales Borderers. Lewis's primary reputation was and remains that of a poet, but he left behind a handful of stories of great promise which suggest also that he might have become a novelist of stature. It would be easy to believe that it was the experience of war that wrenched Lewis out of a narrow, parochial tradition of English writing in Welsh. That this was not so is shown conspicuously by “The Wanderers,” one of the five stories in his volume The Last Inspection that do not deal with...