"... As if Thomas Hardy met Damon Runyon over a loving cup of small beer."
New York Herald Tribune, 1947


"A Masterpiece, a warm, beautiful, splendid book."
Howard Fast

Crynodeb:
Rhyw, llofruddiaeth a hiwmor deifiol sy’n dangos mai Gwyn Thomas ysgrifennodd y tair nofelig yma o 1946. Yn ‘Oscar', mae’r adroddwr am farwolaeth ac ecsploetiaeth yn methu dianc o’r diafol sy’n ei gwmpasu. Yn ‘Simeon’, mae’r camddefnydd o bwer rhywiol a theuluol yn gorffen mewn marwolaeth dreisgar, ac yn ‘The Dark Philosophers’ ei hun, mae’r athronyddwyr tywyll ond doniol yn cwrdd mewn caffi Eidalaidd i adrodd hanes trist talu’r pwyth yn ôl a’r dynladdiad a drefnwyd ganddynt.

Nodiadau bywgraffyddol:
Awdur a darlledwr, ganed Gwyn Thomas yn y Cymer, Y Porth ym 1913.

Mae ei weithiau eraill yn cynnwys The Alone to the Alone (1947); The World Cannot Betray Thee (1949) a Now Lead Us Home (1952), yn ogystal â straeon byrion, dramâu a hunangofiant.

Rhagflas byr

The extraordinary thing about Gwyn Thomas is that he found anything to laugh about. He grew up in one of the grimmest and most depressed areas in the United Kingdom. He was the last (and felt himself to be the least wished-for) of twelve children. His mother died when he was six, leaving the memory of a beautiful and creative woman who ‘would look at me, and almost forgive me, sometimes, for being there.’ He inherited her zest for life, and acquired an appetite for learning which took him to Oxford, but he was miserably hardup and lonely there, and plagued by mysterious health problems. These grew steadily worse until he was twenty three, when he was told that an undiagnosed thyroid malfunction had been poisoning him for years and if he wasn’t promptly operated on he would shortly die. It doesn’t sound like the kind of raw material that would lead to his one day being hailed by a chorus of critics as one of the funniest men in the Western world. When that happened, it would have come as no surprise to those who knew him. Whatever he talked about, he could when he was in the mood reduce his listeners to helpless laughter.
Darllenwch y rhagair cyfan i The Dark Philosophers YMA...

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