SOURCE: “The Stories in Dylan Thomas' Red Notebook,” in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, September, 1971, pp. 33-56.

In the following essay, Tritshler examines Thomas's juvenilia, which is contained in his Red Notebook.

Dylan Thomas filled at least four copybooks with poetry and one, the Red Notebook,¹ with short stories by the time he was twenty. Though he had also written juvenilia that his mother carefully preserved,² these five notebooks contain early and late versions of most of his published poems and nine of his published short stories. Ralph Maud's publication of the four poetry copybooks,³ which were nearly finished when Thomas began the Red Notebook, shows that he had already explored most of his major themes.

The ten Notebook stories likewise contain comparisons of divine, human and artistic creation and Thomas' obsessive paradox of creation as a destruction. They focus his sense of mankind's loss of innocence...