How Green Was My Valley - Paperback

by Richard Llewellyn (Author)

The international-bestselling winner of the National Book Award and the basis for the Academy Award-winning film directed by John Ford.

Huw Morgan remembers the days when his home valley was prosperous, verdant, and beautiful--before the mines came to town. The youngest son of a respectable mining family in South Wales, he is now the only one left in the valley, and his reminiscences tell the story of a family and a town both defined and ruined by the mines.

Huw's story is both joyful and heartrending--a portrait of a place and a people existing now only in memory.

Full of memorable characters, richly crafted language, and surprising humor, How Green Was My Valley is the first of four books chronicling Huw's life, including the sequels Up into the Singing Mountain, Down Where the Moon is Small, and Green, Green My Valley Now.

"The reader emerges from these tense pages strangely aglow with sharing the happiness of the characters . . . The simplicity of the language and its delicately strange flavor give the book added charm." --Chicago Tribune

Author Biography

Richard Llewellyn (1906-1983) was an award-winning British novelist and the child of Welsh parents. He worked as a coal miner, a journalist, and a screenwriter for MGM studios. He served as a captain in the Welsh Guards during World War II, and after the war covered the Nuremberg Trials as a reporter.

He is best known, however, for his novels--particularly those that celebrated coal mining communities in rural Wales. The best known of these, How Green Was My Valley, was published in 1939 to international renown, and was later memorably adapted for film by director John Ford, starring Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O'Hara.