ABSTRACT

Many Welsh critics have given How Green Was M y Valley a hard time. They have attacked it for its lack of verisimilitude to working class life; for its obfuscation and reactionary analysis of significant historical struggles; for its individualist account of political action; and for its racism and sentimentality. In this article I do not set out to rescue Richard Llewellyn’s book from these well-founded critical judgments. But I do stand with those critics who see it as an interesting, complex, and even a key text in the body of writing about the industrial valleys of South Wales.1