Up Into The Singing Mountain by Richard Llewellyn

And yes, I most definitely and in fact absolutely, totally very much do prefer How Green Was My Valley, which truly is not only an epic story of family but at the same time a nostalgic, hauntingly beautiful but equally also often exquisitely painful homage to an area of South Wales lost and gone forever through and because of industry and coal mining.

Richard Llewellyn's 1960 Up Into the Singing Mountain is the sequel to his, to Llewellyn's absolutely brilliant and evocative 1939 How Green Was My Valley. Llewellyn married twice: his first wife was Nona Sonstenby, whom he married in 1952 and divorced in 1968, and his second wife was Susan Heimann, whom he married in 1974. Protagonists who assume new identities, often because they are transplanted into foreign cultures, are a recurring element in Llewellyn's novels, including a spy adventure that extends through several volumes. Late in his life, he lived in Eilat, Israel. Following the war, he worked as a journalist, covering the Nuremberg Trials, and then as a screenwriter for MGM. During World War II, he rose to the rank of Captain in the Welsh Guards. Before World War II, he spent periods working in hotels, wrote a play, worked as a coal miner and produced his best known novel.

He lived a peripatetic life, travelling widely throughout his life. It immortalised the way of life of the South Wales Valleys coal mining communities, where Llewellyn spent a small amount of time with his grandfather. Several of his novels dealt with a Welsh theme, the best-known being How Green Was My Valley (1939), which won international acclaim and was made into a classic Hollywood film. Davids, West Wales was false, though of course he was of Welsh blood. Only after his death was it discovered that his claim that he was born in St. Llewellyn was born of Welsh parents in Hendon, north London in 1906. Richard Llewellyn (real name Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd) was a British novelist.

Up Into The Singing Mountain by Richard Llewellyn