This second volume culled from the Colin Edwards Archive of interviews with Dylan Thomas’ family, friends and colleagues made during the 1960s covers Thomas’ ‘adult’ life from his move, aged 20, to London to become a professional writer to his death in New York 51 years ago. It is a story which we think we know, but the archive sheds new – often contradictory – light on a life which has been much mythologised.

Here are first hand accounts of the young Thomas in the pubs of Fitzrovia with other writers and artists; of his trips to central Europe and the Middle East, and to America. Here too is Thomas the rising literary star; the broadcaster, the filmwriter, the dramatist, the balancer of commissions and creativity. This is also the period of Thomas in love; in marriage, and in love again; and of Thomas balancing the books and making his way as best he could.

Throughout there is fascinating new material in the interviews, on which editor David N. Thomas bases new critical essays on Thomas and painters; on the women behind Polly Garter; the gestation of Thomas’ masterpiece Under Milk Wood; and, most rivetingly of all, on the circumstances of Thomas’ death in New York