From the Welsh mountains, with their coal, chapels, and choruses, came Gwyn Thomas. He was born in 1913 in Porth, deep in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales, and was reared there in the harsh years of the strikes of the twenties and the Great Depression of the thirties. This environment, which shaped his thinking through the long, calamitous years, is reflected in Thomas's own view of his writing.