Dylan Thomas | autograph letter signed, to John Williams Hughes, on being Welsh in America, 22 June 1953

Dylan Thomas

Autograph letter signed, to John Williams Hughes

replying with amusement to a letter from Williams Hughes about his own celebrity in America and the assumption that all Welshmen must be personally acquainted ("...I , too, was in the States only a few weeks ago, and heard of you any number of times - 'what, you don't know John Williams Hughes, and you a Welshman?'..."), 1 page, 8vo, Boat House, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, 22 June 1953, with autograph envelope, very light spotting, short tear (c.7mm) not affecting text

"...'I thought, one American told me, 'that every Welshman knew every other Welshman.' And so he should..."

Williams Hughes had evidently written to Thomas describing how, as a Welshman in America at the height of Thomas's celebrity, he had been asked repeatedly if he knew the poet. Thomas had recently returned from his penultimate American tour, where he had given the first readings from the incomplete Under Milk Wood.