Dwight Thomas is descended from the Welsh mariner John Thomas, the captain of the vessel which brought the first English settlers to the colony of Georgia in 1733. He grew up in Savannah and attended Emory University in Atlanta. During the Vietnam War he served in the United States Army. Subsequently he received a doctoral fellowship in the English Department of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He went on to collaborate with the veteran Poe scholar David K. Jackson in preparing The Poe Log (1987), a thousand-page encyclopedic reconstruction of the poet’s career.