The material collected in this volume, edited and arranged by Daniel Jones, was actually chosen by the author before his death in order to represent, in conjunction with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, such essays and stories as he wished to see preserved.
The contents range from stories written in the thirties, including the title story 'A Prospect of the Sea', which belongs to the time when Thomas settled at Laugharne, his home on a welsh estuary, to the essay 'A Story', which appeared in The Listener a few months before his death. The book received on publication wide acceptance from press and public, and JW Lambert in the Sunday Times underlined the secret of its success when he said it was "in Dylan Thomas's happiest line of fantasticated autobiography...Thomas really found himself as an artist who could achieve poetry in prose" and David Leitch (again in the Sunday Times) on the 10th anniversary of the author's death, noted that "since 1953 the popularity that came so slowly in Thomas's pinchpenny lifetime has turned into a flood." The publishers, in introducing this seventh volume of Dylan Thomas in the series, are helping to keep the waters on the move; for in all Thomas wrote there was a love of humanity as there was of words, and a deep sense of wonder, allied to a most penetrating appreciation of the strangely comic in the mystery of earthly existence. These stories and essays are truly representative of his genius for conveying these things in rhythmic, simple prose.