Before World War II, he spent periods working in hotels, wrote a play, worked as a coal miner and produced his best known novel. He lived a peripatetic life, travelling widely throughout his life.
It immortalised the way of life of the South Wales Valleys coal mining communities, where Llewellyn spent a small amount of time with his grandfather. Several of his novels dealt with a Welsh theme, the best-known being How Green Was My Valley (1939), which won international acclaim and was made into a classic Hollywood film. Davids, West Wales was false, though of course he was of Welsh blood. Only after his death was it discovered that his claim that he was born in St. Llewellyn was born of Welsh parents in Hendon, north London in 1906. This- though in less compelling terms- has recaptured much of the essence of a people.Richard Llewellyn (real name Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd) was a British novelist. Llewellyn has- in the years between- gone far from the mood and scene of his first book. No one will ever forget the flood in the earlier book the one in this is on even a grander scale. This thread of involved romance plays back and forth through issues that stir the whole community, until threat of disaster on a grand scale from the flooding river draws them together. But he has set up housekeeping, so the village feels, with the Widow Glyn, who has designs on him (as apparently have other maidens in the community). Huw falls deeply in love with the eldest of three sisters, held in thrall by their powerful and dominant father. The pull of nationality seems even stronger, transplanted to a distant land, and one senses the undercurrents of violence, of loyalties, of feeling for the soil they are making their own and the villages they are creating.
Huw writes of his silent departure from the temptations of nearness to Bron, his widowed sister-in-law of his shipping for South America and setting up- in a Welsh community there- a carpentry shop which won immediate success.
Now comes another Huw Morgan narrative, stronger in plot values, less compelling on its emotional levels, but again having the sweep of saga in its rhythms of speech and tale. Nineteen years ago How Green Was My Valley rode triumphantly over the difficulties of the Welsh turn of phrase, the names, the remoteness of the setting, to almost immediate recognition of its essential quality as a saga of a people.
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