Davies was the holder of a complex identity: he was a gay man who grew up as a shopkeeper's son in the Rhondda who left Wales to write about his homeland in England. This book unravels a national experience that is deeply bound up in complex negotiations of class, sexuality, and gender and follows a career that was predicted to be that of "the representative Welshman". The book is divided into three sections: the first begins with Davies’s childhood in Blaenclydach and the ways in which his memories of his childhood reinforce continuing themes in his stories and novels; the second will place Davies in literary London and address Davies’s struggle to enter the privileged circles of literary production, circulation, and reception; the final section considers the established Davies of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.