How Green Was My Valley (novel)
1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn
How Green Was My Valley is a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, narrated by Huw Morgan, the main character, about his Welsh family and the mining community in which they live. The author had claimed that he based the book on his own experiences, but this was found after his death to be doubtful; Llewellyn was English-born and spent little time in Wales, though he was of Welsh descent. Llewellyn gathered material for the novel from conversations with local mining families in the village of Gilfach Goch, in southeast Wales.
In the United States, Llewellyn won the National Book Award for favourite novel of 1940, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.
Plot summary
The novel is set in South Wales during the reigns of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. It tells the story of the Morgans, a respectable mining family of the South Wales Valleys, through the eyes of the youngest son, Huw Morgan.
Huw's academic ability sets him apart from his elder brothers and enables him to consider a future away from the dangerous coal mines. He loses his opportunity because of fighting with a schoolmaster who punishes children for speaking Welsh. His five brothers and his father are miners. After his eldest brother, Ivor, is killed in a mining accident, Huw moves in with Ivor's young widow, Bronwen, with whom he has always secretly been in love.
One of Huw's three sisters, Angharad, marries Iestyn Evans, the wealthy mine owner's son – whom she does not love – and the marriage is an unhappy one.
“How Green Was My Valley (novel)” enters the record as 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Green, Valley and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3398593. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939 and 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “How Green Was My Valley (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.