[This entry was updated by David Leon Higdon (Texas Tech University) from the entry by Karen Dorn in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 388-394.]

D. M. Thomas is widely known for his novel The White Hotel, which quickly rose to the top of the best-seller lists after its American publication in the spring of 1981. He is also an accomplished poet, and in his poetry as well as in his novels he has developed a style that is a powerful evocation of the imaginative life.

A native of Carnkai, near Redruth, Cornwall, Donald Michael Thomas grew up in what he considered a "distinctive landscape with a spirit," and as part of a Methodist chapel-going family with a strong interest in America. An ancestor had lived briefly in New York, and his parents, Harold Redvers and Amy Thomas, had spent ten years in California, where his...