The Last Days of Dylan Thomas: Smog, Morphine and the Myth of 18 Whiskies

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In October 1953 Dylan Thomas landed in New York as the most famous living poet in the English-speaking world. He was 38, broke, worn out and already struggling to breathe. Twenty days later he was dead in a Greenwich Village hospital bed, and the legend was already being written: the hellraising Welshman who drank 18 straight whiskies and drank himself into the grave.

It's a great story. It's also mostly wrong. The barman didn't believe it, the witnesses didn't back it up and the post-mortem pointed somewhere else entirely. What really happened is a story of a sick man let down at almost every turn: by an agent who stayed away, a doctor who reached for the syringe instead of the stethoscope and a circle of friends and lovers who kept the party going long after it should've stopped.

Quick Answers

When did Dylan Thomas die? On Monday 9 November 1953 at St Vincent's Hospital in New York. He was 39.
What did he die of? The post-mortem found pneumonia and swelling of the brain. Most researchers now think morphine injections from his doctor made a bad chest infection fatal.
Did he really drink 18 whiskies? Almost certainly not. Witnesses at the White Horse Tavern put it nearer six or eight.
Where's he buried? In the churchyard of St Martin's in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, under a plain white cross he shares with his wife Caitlin.

Why Dylan Thomas Went Back to America in 1953

This was his fourth American tour, and he went for the same reason he'd gone on the other three: money. Thomas was hopeless with it. There were debts in Wales, a wife and three children at the Boathouse in Laugharne and a tax bill that never seemed to shrink. America paid, and it paid well, because Americans had fallen hard for that rolling, theatrical voice. If you've never heard it, listen to him read Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and you'll understand why halls sold out.

His fame had been building since the 1930s, helped along by champions like Dame Edith Sitwell, whose praise did a lot to turn a cocky young Swansea poet into a serious name. By 1953 he was a genuine star on American campuses, and his agent, the poet and organiser John Malcolm Brinnin, lined up readings to cash in on it.

There was a bigger prize on the horizon too. Thomas had been talking with Igor Stravinsky about writing the words for an opera, and the plan was to head on to California after New York to work on it. It never happened.

The problem was that Thomas wasn't well when he left Britain. He'd been having trouble with his chest, he'd suffered blackouts and he was drinking heavily. People who saw him that autumn said he looked bloated, grey and much older than he was. He'd even managed to lose the manuscript of Under Milk Wood in a London pub, which very nearly meant American audiences never heard the finished play.

Smog, Shivers and a Collapse at Rehearsal

Thomas arrived in New York on 19 October and the tour proper started the following day. He booked into the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, the shabby bohemian hangout he loved, and took room 205.

The city he walked into was choking. New York was in the middle of a nasty smog episode that autumn, a thick blanket of industrial pollution that hung over Manhattan for days. By late November it had been linked to around 200 deaths. For a man with a weak chest it was about the worst place on earth to be, and the smog quickly set off an attack of what was assumed to be bronchitis.

Brinnin, who'd watched Thomas wobble through previous tours, handed day-to-day care of his star to his assistant at the 92nd Street Y, Liz Reitell. That arrangement looked sensible on paper. In reality it put a sick, chaotic man in the hands of a woman who was in love with him.

Dylan Thomas and Liz Reitell

Reitell had met Thomas that spring, when Brinnin gave her the job of wrangling the first production of Under Milk Wood. She ended up managing the play and the poet, chasing lost pages, keeping him sober enough to rehearse and holding the whole thing together. Somewhere along the way they became lovers. The National Library of Wales holds a letter Thomas wrote to her from the Boathouse in June 1953, a few weeks after he'd gone home, and its catalogue describes her plainly as his lover. Another followed in July.

So when Thomas landed in October, he wasn't coming back to a tour manager. He was coming back to the woman he'd been writing to all summer, while Caitlin was at home in Laugharne with the children. One account of that year puts it bluntly: nobody told Caitlin he'd found himself a new mother figure in New York. Reitell was his minder, his editor, his carer and his girlfriend all at once, and over the next three weeks he spent many of his nights with her.

The big event of the trip was Under Milk Wood, his play for voices about a day in the life of a small Welsh seaside town. He'd given it its first full reading at the 92nd Street Y earlier that year and was still tinkering with the script. At a rehearsal on 23 October he was feverish and shivering, and he collapsed. A doctor gave him injections to keep him going.

And somehow he kept going. On 24 and 25 October he performed Under Milk Wood to packed houses, and by all accounts he was magnificent. They were the last great performances of his life.

A Grim 39th Birthday and a Last Public Appearance

Thomas turned 39 on 27 October. Friends threw a small party for him, but he was low and miserable and left early. Birthdays always seemed to set him brooding about getting old, and this one was worse than most.

Dylan Thomas in the White Horse Tavern in New York

The next evening, 28 October, he made what turned out to be his last public appearance. It was a symposium on poetry and film at Cinema 16, the New York film society, where he sat on a panel alongside the playwright Arthur Miller and the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. The transcript survives, and it's Thomas who gets the laughs, poking fun at the earnest academic chat while Deren grows visibly annoyed.

Over the following days he drifted between the Chelsea, the bars of Greenwich Village and Reitell's bed. He was sleeping badly, coughing, eating very little and complaining that he couldn't get his breath. He told her more than once that he felt he was dying. It was the kind of thing he said a lot, so not everyone took it seriously, and Brinnin, who'd heard it all before, kept his distance.

The Night of the 18 Straight Whiskies

In the small hours of Wednesday 4 November, at around 2am, Thomas got out of bed beside Reitell at the Chelsea and headed to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, his favourite Village bar. He came back about an hour later, announced to her the line that would follow him forever, “I've had 18 straight whiskies. I think that's the record,” and fell asleep.

It's the most famous thing he never quite did. The barman later said it wasn't true, and most people who were around that night put the number at six or eight. Thomas usually drank beer rather than spirits, and he was a showman who liked a good line. In his weakened state even a handful of whiskies would've hit him hard, but 18 doubles is the stuff of pub legend, not fact.

His biographer Paul Ferris reckoned the whisky story would never die because it suits a poet so well, and he was right. The legend spread across America within days. Robert Lowell was soon passing gossip to Elizabeth Bishop in a letter, and the tale was swapped in literary circles in Chicago and Iowa City long before anyone had seen a medical report. The 2020 film Last Call, starring Rhys Ifans, still builds its whole plot around the 18 whiskies.

The White Horse has never minded. It's still pouring pints today, with portraits of Thomas on the walls and drinkers raising a glass to him in the room where he sat.

Dr Feltenstein and the Syringe

Later on 4 November Thomas got much worse. He was struggling to breathe, vomiting and in a lot of pain, and Reitell was frightened. She called Brinnin, who didn't come. He wouldn't see Thomas again until the poet was in a coma.

Capt. Milton Feltenstein (left) with Sgt. Fred Wenk of the 119th AAA Bn. in WWII

Instead Reitell called her own doctor, Milton Feltenstein, a fashionable physician she'd already introduced to Thomas. On the spring trip he'd set Thomas's arm after a fall and given him cortisone injections for gout and gastritis. This time he made three visits to room 205 and each time he injected Thomas with morphine and corticotrophin, a hormone treatment.

Feltenstein had decided the problem was delirium tremens, the shakes and hallucinations that hit heavy drinkers when they stop. He never seems to have properly examined Thomas's chest. Had he done so, he might've found what the hospital found later: pneumonia. The worst thing you can give someone who's already fighting for breath is a drug that slows breathing down, and that's exactly what morphine does.

The final injection, given around midnight, was a dose of no less than 30mg of morphine. Not long afterwards Thomas's face turned blue and he slipped into unconsciousness. Reitell later described Feltenstein as “a wild doctor who believed injections could cure anything.”

In the early hours of 5 November an ambulance took Thomas the short distance to St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. He never woke up.

Four Days in a Coma at St Vincent's Hospital

At St Vincent's things got no less chaotic. Feltenstein was still nominally in charge and tried to keep other doctors from getting involved. Junior staff were reportedly stunned that he wouldn't accept the evidence in front of him, and it was nearly 24 hours before anyone formally diagnosed pneumonia. A brain specialist, Dr Carlos de Gutiérrez-Mahoney, was eventually brought in and took over. Thomas was given a tracheotomy to help him breathe and placed in an oxygen tent.

News spread fast and the hospital corridors filled with poets, hangers-on and rival friends who didn't much like each other. Reitell stayed close for as long as she could. The Scottish poet Ruthven Todd spent long hours at the bedside and became the unofficial keeper of the vigil. The American poet John Berryman was there too. Brinnin finally turned up. Everyone had a view on who was to blame, and the atmosphere was poisonous.

Then Caitlin was on her way, and Reitell's position became impossible. The woman who'd shared his bed for weeks, called the doctor and watched him turn blue was suddenly the other woman, with the wife flying in from Wales.

Caitlin's marriage to Dylan had been stormy for years, and she arrived drunk, furious and frightened. Her reported first words on reaching the hospital were “Is the bloody man dead yet?” Over the next day or so she lashed out at a nurse, attacked Brinnin, tore a crucifix off the wall and smashed a statue of the Virgin Mary. She was eventually forced into a straitjacket and taken to a private psychiatric clinic, so she wasn't even in the building when her husband died.

The Death of Dylan Thomas: 9 November 1953

Dylan Thomas died around midday on Monday 9 November 1953 without regaining consciousness. He was 39 years old and had been in New York for just three weeks.

The post-mortem was carried out by Milton Helpern, one of America's best-known forensic pathologists. He found that the immediate cause of death was swelling of the brain, and that the main cause was bronchopneumonia. Crucially, he found no cirrhosis of the liver and no sign of the alcohol-related brain damage that the gossip had already settled on.

Decades later the British pathologist Bernard Knight reviewed the report and concluded that the pneumonia had almost certainly started before Thomas was admitted to hospital. In other words, he'd been seriously ill for days while being treated for the wrong thing.

The People Who Failed Dylan Thomas

Thomas wasn't an easy man to look after. He drank too much, smoked constantly, ignored advice and loved playing the doomed poet. But he was also very obviously ill, in a foreign city, surrounded by people who were either paid to look after him or said they loved him. Almost all of them let him down.

Dr Milton Feltenstein

The doctor carries the heaviest blame. He treated a man with a raging chest infection for alcohol withdrawal, apparently without listening to his lungs, and then gave him repeated doses of a drug that suppresses breathing. When Thomas reached hospital and the x-rays showed pneumonia, he still wouldn't accept it and tried to keep other doctors at arm's length. When the Maryland physician William Murphy reviewed the records for Caitlin in 1964, he couldn't see what good the morphine was supposed to have done.

John Malcolm Brinnin

Brinnin organised the tour, booked the readings and knew better than anyone how frail Thomas had become. Rather than cancel or slow things down, he passed the problem to his assistant. When Reitell rang him in a panic on 4 November he stayed away. He didn't see Thomas again until he was unconscious in St Vincent's. Then, two years later, he wrote the bestselling book that told the world Thomas had drunk himself to death, a version that conveniently left the agent's own absence out of the frame.

Liz Reitell

Reitell is the most sympathetic figure in the story and she certainly did more for Thomas than anyone else. She was the one who noticed, worried and picked up the phone. But she wasn't a nurse, she was in love with him and she was out of her depth. The doctor she called was her own trusted physician and she didn't push for a hospital until it was too late. In later years she was scathing about Feltenstein, which suggests she spent a long time living with that decision.

The friends and the hangers-on

Then there's everyone else: the hosts who kept topping up his glass at parties, the admirers who wanted a night out with the famous Welsh poet and the friends who'd heard him say he was dying so often they'd stopped listening. Nobody in that circle insisted he see a proper chest specialist. Nobody called an ambulance until he was already in a coma.

Did anyone pay for it?

No. Neither Brinnin nor Feltenstein ever faced legal action or a formal inquiry, and by the time biographers had pieced the medical case together, almost everyone involved was dead.

How the Myth of Dylan Thomas's Death Took Hold

If the medical evidence was so clear, why did everyone believe he drank himself to death? A lot of it comes down to Brinnin's 1955 book Dylan Thomas in America, which painted Thomas as a self-destructive drunk and pushed the idea that alcohol had wrecked his brain. It was the version people wanted, and it made Brinnin look a lot better than the truth did.

Caitlin never let it lie, and she commissioned the 1964 review of the hospital papers. Paul Ferris backed the pneumonia and morphine explanation in his biographies of 1977 and 1999. In 1997 James Nashold and George Tremlett argued in The Death of Dylan Thomas that he'd been badly let down by his medical care, and in 2008 the Welsh writer David N. Thomas went further in Fatal Neglect, laying much of the blame at the door of Brinnin and Feltenstein.

The story's been dramatised plenty of times since. The BBC's 2014 drama A Poet in New York, written by Andrew Davies, starred Tom Hollander as Thomas and Phoebe Fox as Reitell, and cast her and Brinnin as helpless bystanders to his decline. Over the years other theories have popped up too, from a mugging to undiagnosed diabetes, but none has the weight of the hospital records.

It's a pattern you see a lot with literary deaths. A complicated medical story gets flattened into a simple one that fits the writer's image, as happened with Ernest Hemingway's final hours in Ketchum. In Thomas's case, the drunk Welsh bard dying for his art was a far better headline than a sick man with a chest infection being given the wrong injection.

Home to Laugharne

Thomas's body was shipped back across the Atlantic on the liner SS United States and taken home to Laugharne, the estuary town where he'd written much of his later work. He was buried on 24 November 1953 in the overspill graveyard of St Martin's Church, with the whole town turning out to see him off.

Pallbearers carry Dylan's coffin from the boathouse in Laugharne

His grave is marked by a simple white wooden cross, which feels about right for a man who never had any money. Caitlin moved to Italy and lived another four decades, but when she died in 1994 her will insisted she be brought back to Laugharne and buried with him. Her name is on the back of the same cross.

In 1982 Thomas was finally given a memorial in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, and a replica of the plaque hangs inside St Martin's. The Boathouse where he lived and the little writing shed above it are now open to visitors, still looking out over the estuary he wrote about.

There's a dark irony in how it ended. Thomas's best-known poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, is a furious plea to his dying father to fight death all the way. When his own time came, in a hotel room filling with smog, he was given a drug that made sure he couldn't.