In this authoritative, fresh, and compelling account of the extraordinary life and enduring work of Dylan Thomas—author of Under Milkwood, A Child's Christmas in Wales, Adventures in the Skin Trade, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog, and numerous poems and stories—Andrew Lycett peels back the layers of story that have accumulated around this extraordinarily talented writer, one of the most celebrated and contradictory literary figures of the twentieth century.

Lycett uses as his overwhelming motif the deeply ambivalent forces in Thomas' life—"I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me" said Thomas—that allowed him to be a wild boy in public and a poet of deep sensitivity in private, and helped him to bridge the gap between modernism and pop, the written and the spoken word, individual art and performance art.