Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is a collection of short prose stories written by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, first published by Dent on 4 April 1940. The first paperback copy appeared in 1948, published by the British Publishers Guild. All of the stories are autobiographical and all are set in the writer's native Swansea in South Wales. Written over a number of years, the often comic stories show glimpses of his life, from early childhood up to his teens as a young reporter for the "South Wales Daily Post".
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: