Last Days of Dylan Thomas - Hardcover

Gittins, Rob

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 035610995X ISBN 13: 9780356109954

Verlag: TBS The Book Service Ltd, 1986

Inhaltsangabe

On the 19 October 1953 Dylan Thomas arrived in New York at the start of his fourth visit to America. The omens could not have been less auspicious. The poet's health was breaking down; his wife Caitlin had violently opposed the plan; the flight itself had been disastrous; even the room reserved at his favourite Chelsea Hotel turned out to be small, dark and inadequate. To his American mistress Liz Reitell, who had eagerly awaited him at the airport, Thomas looked 'frail, pale and shaky... sad too, tormented, quite tormented'. And so he was: by premonitions of inadequacy and disaster; by financial problems; by drink; by a failing mind and 'the horrors' of delirium tremens. His stay was marked by drama, chaos, violent shifts in personal allegiances, by behaviour of such boorishness and insensitivity as to amount to madness. And its finale came with his death on Monday 9 November, in St Vincent's Hospital.
No period in the life of one of the twentieth century's most gifted, popular and controversial poets has been more obscured by myth, misinformation, misinterpretation, and even downright misrepresentation. But now that thirty years have passed much new information has come to light, particularly Liz Reitell's journal, previously thought not to exist. For the first time a detailed and impartial account of three traumatic weeks can be pieced together - the drinking bouts, the hysterical scenes, the efforts at rehabilitation, the final debacle. Above all, new light can be thrown on the one great, over-riding achievement: the triumphant performance on 24 October of'Under Milk Wood' in the poet's last, and perforce definitive, version, a masterpiece of poetry and staging still awaiting acknowledgement as a literary legacy - the generally accepted version, it can be argued, being incomplete.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: TBS The Book Service Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1986
• ISBN 10: 035610995X
• ISBN 13: 9780356109954
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256