Richard Llewellyn(1906–1983)

Richard Llewellyn, born Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd on 8 December 1906, came of a south Wales family of miners and tin-plate workers from the western coal-valley country between Llanelli and Pontypridd. He was schooled in Cardiff and, on an uncle's scholarship, at a Catholic boarding school in Rome.

He took a kitchen-and-restaurant apprenticeship at Claridge's in Mayfair, enlisted in the British Army in 1926 and served five years with the 9th Lancers in India and Hong Kong, and on his return worked as a reporter on the Cinema News trade weekly and wrote three small produced stage plays. At thirty-two, in 1938, he took a typewriter to a rented cottage on the south coast and wrote the novel that became his career.

How Green Was My Valley was published in London on 2 October 1939, two weeks after the British declaration of war. The six-hundred-page first-person retrospective by the surviving son Huw Morgan of a south Wales coal-valley family set out the foundational popular-fiction template of twentieth-century Welsh national identity: the chapel-and-rugby-and-coal community before the industrial collapse, the Welsh-language family and parish life, and the scattering of the community through strike, flood and emigration. It sold fifty thousand copies in its first year, two million across the war, and has sold seven million in continuous publication across the eighty-six years since.

The John Ford film adaptation, produced by Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox, was released on 28 October 1941. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 1942 ceremony in one of the most-discussed Best Picture decisions in the history of the awards; Ford took Best Director, Donald Crisp took Best Supporting Actor, and the film took five Oscars in total. It has remained, on the popular-cinema reception, the film image of pre-war south Wales for the eight decades since.

He wrote three sequel novels carrying the Morgan family forward, Up, Into the Singing Mountain (1960), Down Where the Moon Is Small (1966) and Green, Green My Valley Now (1975), and a body of further fiction, and lived between Dublin, Tokyo and Switzerland in his later years. He died in Dublin on 30 November 1983, six months short of his seventy-seventh birthday. The Llewellyn name, the Welsh patronymic ap Llywelyn carried by the medieval princes of Gwynedd, he carried into the foundational popular-fiction image of twentieth-century Wales.