SOURCE: “Living ‘under the shadow of the bowler’: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog,” in Dylan Thomas: Craft or Sullen Art, edited by Alan Bold, Vision Press, 1990, pp. 125–36.

In the following excerpt, Rowe maintains that Thomas refashioned his own middle-class childhood in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog to make it more palatable.

Dylan Thomas is pre-eminently a rememberer; in both his poetry and prose, as John Wain has noted, ‘his great theme is nostalgia’.¹ Indeed his best fiction, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, is a celebration of his childhood, adolescence and young manhood in Swansea. The ten stories that make up the collection, published originally in 1940, have been described by Vernon Watkins as ‘stories about human beings living and behaving exactly as they used to live and behave when he was a child’.² But the ‘he’ is Dylan Thomas of...