SOURCE: “Stories and Dramas,” in Dylan Thomas, Twayne Publishers, 1992.

In the following essay, Korg analyzes the poetic and straightforward narrative styles that characterize Thomas's stories.

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Thomas was as prolific a writer of prose as he was of verse. He published the first of his short stories, “After the Fair,” in March 1934, less than a year after his earliest poems had appeared, and he continued to write prose until his death. In addition to his numerous short stories, the uncompleted novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade, three prose dramas, the radio play, Under Milk Wood, and several film scripts, he wrote book reviews, radio talks, and descriptive essays, many of them collected in the posthumously published volume, Quite Early One Morning.¹

Thomas's fiction may be divided sharply into two classifications: vigorous fantasies in poetic style, a genre he discontinued after 1939, and straightforward, objective narratives. Until 1939 he seems to have...