Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

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Background

All of the stories are autobiographical and all are set in the writer's native Swansea in South Wales. Written over a number of years, the often comic stories show glimpses of his life, from early childhood up to his teens as a young reporter for the South Wales Daily Post.

Thomas claimed, in a letter to Vernon Watkins, that he had "kept the flippant title for—as the publishers advise—money-making reasons". He claimed also, straining credulity, that the title was not a parody of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, even though the general influence of Joyce's Dubliners was freely acknowledged. In August 1939 Thomas wrote to Watkins: "I've been busy over stories, pot-boiling stories for a book, semi-autobiographical, to be finished by Christmas."

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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

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