Mr. Rhys Davies is a very good writer who in a long life has never had the public recognition he deserves. One hopes that … [Print of a Hare's Foot] will help to repair the omission and serve to remind people that he is among the best short story writers of our time. Indeed, [these autobiographical fragments] have the same qualities of freshness and compassion that are revealed in his stories; the difference is that here it is his own experiences which Mr. Davies recounts, only he sees them with very much the same eye as he turns upon those of others.

Print of a Hare's Foot tells the story of Mr. Davies' early life, first in childhood and youth in one of the most remote outposts of the Rhondda at the beginning of this century, and later as a young man on the threshold of a literary career in London. Mr. Davies is an old man now, but one has the sense that he still sees with a boy's clear vision. Many people before him have attempted to describe the extraordinary, one is tempted to say unique, society that until recently existed in the mining valleys of South Wales; no one, I think, has brought it to life quite so vividly as Mr. Davies does here. (p. 74)

Mr. Davies' account of his childhood and youth in this exotic society has a wonderful spontaneity; every detail in it is vivid, exact, authentic, and never blurred by overemphasis or exaggeration. He has the seeing eye of the born writer, but what comes as a surprise is that he preserves the same simplicity and clarity of vision in the very different world of literary London in the 1920s; the scene here is, for most people, a much more familiar one, but in Mr. Davies' description, we see it as he saw it himself, with the eyes of a young man for whom it was an almost total contrast to anything he had known before. (pp. 74-5)