Fifty years have passed since two young women hauled the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas into a studio in New York City where he read the story A Child's Christmas in Wales and the half-dozen poems that became one of the most popular recordings in the history of literature.

All three were making their first record. Barbara Cohen Holdridge and Marianne Roney Mantell, both then 22, were founding Caedmon Records with about $1,500 and more or less unlimited hope. They gave Thomas a $500 advance and a promise of 10 percent of the royalties. He was their first poet - in a catalog that would eventually encompass T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, e.e. cummings, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, all the Sitwells and all of the plays of Shakespeare.

Thomas then was perhaps the first superstar of poetry and maybe the last. He was the poete maudit of the post-World War II generation. But he was more bad boy than evil genius, with the curly-haired, cherubic good looks of a wasted angel. He drank and smoked too much, and he slept with too many women, at least from the point of view of his wife, Caitlin. And he died too young - although he was 39 and had three children. "He had his pick of lovely young college girls, which he picked," Holdridge says, laughing.

Holdridge - who will be inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in October - has lived in the Baltimore area since her marriage to the late Lawrence Holdridge, an engineer, 43 years ago.

She runs Stemmer House Publishers, which puts out a wide variety of books, including the International Design Library. Her publishing company is named for her home on Caves Road, a 250-year old colonial mansion brought brick by brick from eastern Baltimore County in 1930.

She's a handsome woman who speaks with precise clarity of the origins of Caedmon Records in that twilight of a golden era of American literature. She sits on a patio that looks out on a lawn that slopes down to a grove of trees. A small fountain gurgles into a nearby L-shaped modern pool.

In Manhattan, she recalls, Dylan Thomas stayed at the Hotel Chelsea, which has harbored generations of writers, artists and musicians, from Mark Twain to William Burroughs to Sid Vicious, who killed his girlfriend there. Thomas drank at the White Horse Tavern, where he is said to have uttered these perhaps apocryphal last words: "I've had 18 straight whiskeys. I think that's the record." He died Nov. 9, 1953.

In early 1952, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell, then Cohen and Roney, had gone to hear Thomas at the 92nd Street Y, the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, whose renowned series of poetry readings continues today.

"I knew of him because I read his poem 'In the White Giant's Thigh' in The Atlantic, and I was bowled over by it," Holdridge says. "And I was even more bowled over when hundreds, if not thousands, of subscribers canceled because of that poem. They really did. They were outraged. That was the clincher."

Thomas read the sensual, mysterious and lovely "In the White Giant's Thigh" on the first Caedmon recording.

"America in the '50s was more prudish than we are today, I think," Holdridge says.

Thomas was beginning his second American tour when Holdridge and Mantell went to the 92nd Street Y to hear him. They had graduated from Hunter College in 1950.

"We both had a literary education," Holdridge says. "We met in a summer Greek class."

In 1952, she was an assistant editor at Liveright, a New York publisher that traced back to Boni & Liveright, the influential 1920s firm whose authors included Faulkner, Pound, Cummings and the young Ernest Hemingway.

"It was not what it had been the '20s," she says. "But, you know, the aura was there, and the feeling was there and every Saturday I would go in ... and I would read the old files. And the old files were filled with letters from [W.H.] Auden and Cummings and Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter and all of these people whom I was going to know within the next two years."

Mantell was already in the recording business, doing liner notes for one of the minor labels.

"She said let's go and record [Thomas]," Holdridge says. "We had been vaguely talking about doing some recordings of authors, but this was our first."

So they went to the 92nd Street Y not only to listen to Thomas, but also with a business proposition. They sent a note backstage:

Dear Mr. Thomas:

We have been told that there is no admission to backstage but that you will come after the recital to "greet" the crowd.

We are interested in discussing a recording and publishing project with you, but find the crowd a little impractical for this. Have you some suggestions as to how we could meet?

Holdridge still has the note.

"We signed it with our first initials and last names," she says, "little realizing if we signed it Marianne and Barbara he would have hopped to it with alacrity. As it was, he dodged us for a week. Phone calls were never returned.

"One day I made the heroic sacrifice of getting up at 5 in the morning and putting the call through to the Hotel Chelsea, and he was just stumbling in from a roistering night, probably at the White Horse."

He agreed to meet them at the Little Shrimp, which she remembers as the restaurant of the Chelsea in those days, and he made a deal to read for Caedmon Records, which was more or less called into existence on the spot. (Caedmon was the first poet to write in English.)

Mantell remembers that Thomas chose the poems and wrote the list in tiny round letters in her appointment book for Friday, Feb. 15, 1952.

Of course, he didn't show up. Both women think he may have detoured to the White Horse. The next week they sent a messenger to bring him to Steinway Studios on 57th Street.

Thomas began reading "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," the poem written on the eve of his father's death.

"He stood, but every once in a while he would sit on the ledge of the stage and smoke a cigarette and then go on," Holdridge says. "It was a small studio. We were right there in front of him, being audience. We were always very good at being audience."

He read "In a White Giant's Thigh," "Fern Hill," "Ceremony After a Fire Raid" and a couple other poems.

"And then he came to a stop, and we said but that's not quite enough for a long-playing record," Holdridge says. "He thought for a minute and then he said, 'Well, there's the story I wrote for a magazine. It was something about Christmas. A Child's Christmas in Wales.'

"We hadn't read it," she says. "But if he wanted to record it, we agreed to do it. So Marianne rushed over to the Harper's Bazaar office and got the one file copy on the solemn promise of returning it. Which, of course, she did.

"And he recorded it. We were beguiled by it. We loved it. That recording took off. Every literate bobbysoxer in New York came up to the office to buy it.

"I don't know what would have happened if we had not recorded it. It would have languished at Harper's Bazaar. I don't know that anyone would have dug it up. And it has been one of the most popular recordings and the most popular stories of the 20th century.

"It was beautiful, beautiful reading and beautiful recording."

Caedmon's A Child's Christmas in Wales has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and it's still selling.

HarperCollins, which now owns the Caedmon imprint, has issued a 50th anniversary collection of Dylan Thomas readings that includes A Child's Christmas in Wales. And on Oct. 5, Holdridge will be inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y., with, among others, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Rosalynn Carter and the late Lucille Ball. (Holdridge was chosen for the honor in 2001, but the ceremony was delayed a year because of the terrorist attack.) She's also going to be the guest of honor at a special Caedmon Day at the Dylan Thomas Festival in Wales.

In his introductions to the new Caedmon Collection, Billy Collins, the poet laureate of the United States, calls Thomas "the Caruso of the spoken word." And in a Thomasesque phrase, he describes the reading as "the round rolling roar of the roly-poly Welshman."

Holdridge and Mantell went on to record T.S. Eliot in London and the painter Diego Rivera in Mexico City, but Holdridge failed to get Pablo Picasso in France when Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, threatened her with arrest if she so much as showed up.

But Carl Sandburg was "delightful."

"He made a number of recordings for us," Holdridge says. "He would sit there in his shawl. He was always cold."

Eudora Welty was "a very, very sweet person."

"She reads Why I Live at the PO hilariously. It's a hilarious story anyway, but when Eudora reads it in her Southern-cadenced voice, it's wonderful."

And when Katherine Anne Porter was impoverished, they would bring her little tidbits: "wine and herring and crackers and give her a little boost in the afternoon. She appreciated them. Later on she became a bit eccentric."

William Faulkner was a "triumph" for them. He read his Nobel Prize speech. "But the day he recorded there was a baseball game on, and he was much more interested in getting the scores than in the recording," Holdridge says.

Archibald MacLeish was her all-time favorite.

"He was a scholar and a gentleman and a very fine poet. Unfortunately he's eclipsed now. One doesn't read his poetry today, I guess. But he made a beautiful recording."

MacLeish introduced them to e.e. cummings and wrote a letter of introduction to Ezra Pound. Pound had been charged with treason at the end of World War II for broadcasting fascist propaganda from Mussolini's Rome. He was declared insane and committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington.

Holdridge and Mantell recorded him in the garden at St. Elizabeth's, reading from The Cantos, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" and Provencal poems.

On their last visit they brought him an Italian sausage.

"Because he loved Italy," Holdridge says. "And sure enough he went back to Italy to live and die. But he flew into one of his rages, I have no idea why, and hurled this heavy salami at me. Which I dodged.

"Yet [Pound] was a wonderful man in many ways. He was a mentor to poets. Sometimes we could come and he would have a gaggle of young poets sitting around him.

"But he didn't sell especially well."

Their goal was never sales. Although they peddled the Dylan Thomas recording virtually store to store in Manhattan and they would eventually make a considerable amount of money, mostly on educational stuff, their recordings of famous poets often languished unsold for long periods of time.

"What we were aiming for was the moment of inspiration," Holdridge says. "Because when they spoke their works aloud, they were in a way re-living them. And that's what came through and that's what we were after. We weren't just doing their voices."

And they did succeed in capturing the true voice of a great generation of writers and artists and actors. You just have to listen.