Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog "the atmosphere of schoolboy smut and practical jokes and poetry is evoked with lingering accuracy but with nothing more". Critic Jacob Korg later commented that "taken as a group, [the stories] seem to trace the child's emergence from his domain of imagination and secret pleasures into an adult world where he observes suffering, pathos, and dignity". The book has been described as showing Thomas' "waggish humor at its best, his exuberance & verbal magic in spectacular display". Apart from "Under Milk Wood", the book is "probably the most famous Dylan Thomas book published during his lifetime... certainly the most loved
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog Thomas claimed, in a letter to Vernon Watkins, that he had "kept the flippant title for—as the publishers advise—money-making reasons". He claimed also, somewhat dubiously, that the title was not a parody of James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", although the general influence of Joyce's "Dubliners" was freely acknowledged. In August 1939 Thomas wrote to Watkins: "I've been busy over stories, pot-boiling stories for a book, semi-autobiographical, to be finished by Christmas." Reviews of the book were mixed and initially it did not sell well. Ferris, reviewing the book in "The Times Literary Supplement" said: