David Caradoc Evans (31 December 1878 – 11 January 1945), was a Welsh story writer, novelist and playwright.
Evans was brought up in aWelsh-speaking community inRhydlewis,Cardiganshire, and although he learned English at school and always wrote in English his work is influenced by Welsh syntax and vocabulary in a similar way to the wayLewis Grassic Gibbon's work in Scotland (written in roughly the same period) was influenced byScots. Evans left school at 14 and worked throughout Wales in a series of menial jobs before moving to London where he worked as a draper's apprentice.[1] He attended classesSt Pancras Working Men's College and then became a journalist. He worked forThe Daily Mirror from 1917 before editingT.P.'s Weekly from 1923 until the weekly folded in 1929.[1]
His first (and possibly most important) work of fiction was a series of short stories calledMy People, published byAndrew Melrose in 1915. It may be compared withSherwood Anderson'sWinesburg, Ohio andJames Joyce'sDubliners. In tone, however, this work is closer toThe House with the Green Shutters byGeorge Douglas Brown.
Evans wished to shock the Welsh out of their complacency and smugness by contrasting the pieties of non-conformist Christianity with the brutal realities of poverty, meanness and hypocrisy he had personally experienced.
The work was savagely attacked by Welsh critics – he was known for a while in the Welsh press as "the best hated man in Wales"—but can now be seen as perhaps the first genuinely modern work ofAnglo-Welsh literature. Evans wrote numerous other novels, plays and short story collections, but none attained the success ofMy People. His next collection,Capel Sion, was withdrawn from Welsh bookshops, because of the hostility he had aroused as much as for the subject matter.
Dylan Thomas's early and more surreal writing is said to be influenced by Caradoc'sMy People.[3] Both Caradoc Evans, and Dylan Thomas's namesake and great uncleGwilym Marles (William Thomas) were born inLlandysul.[4]
Caradoc met (1929) and later married (1933) the Countess Helene Marguerite Barcynska, who wrote romantic novels under the nameOliver Sandys. His first wife, Rose Jesse (nee Sewell), whom he had married on Christmas Day 1907, petitioned for divorce in 1932. Living together inAberystwyth and atRuislip,Middlesex from 1937 to 1939, Marguerite and Caradoc were involved in theatrical ventures, both in Wales and in England.[1]
After the outbreak of theSecond World War in 1939, they returned to Aberystwyth, and eventually settled in 1940 in New Cross, Cardiganshire, about five miles from Aberystwyth, where Caradoc remained with his son until his own death in 1945. In the 1940s, Marguerite wrote two autobiographical works, published by the publisherHurst and Blackett. The first,Full and Frank: the Private Life of the Woman Novelist (1941), is a presentation of the author's life to the public. The second is a biography of Caradoc. The house they lived in, "Brynawelon" had spectacular views ofPlynlimon, which may have inspired her bookThe Miracle Stone of Wales (1957). Caradoc Evans died of heart failure at the Aberystwyth and Cardiganshire General Hospital, Aberystwyth in January 1945 aged 66 and is buried in the New Cross Horeb chapel cemetery.[1][5]
