He was educated at Rhyl High School, where, as E. O. Humphreys, he started composing poetry and wrote for The Welsh Nationalist, the monthly English-language newspaper of the Welsh Nationalist Party, later called by Plaid Cymru.
[4] After the war he worked as a teacher, as a radio producer at the BBC, and later became a lecturer in drama at Bangor University.
[5][6][7] Having become fluent in the Welsh language while at Aberystwyth, Humphreys went on to learn Italian while working in Italy after the war, and spent time there as well as studying the country's literature.
[12] Humphreys's masterpiece was The Land of the Living (1974–2001), an epic sequence of seven novels charting the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Wales.
He also wrote plays for stage and television, short stories, The Taliesin Tradition (a cultural history of Wales), and published his Collected Poems in 1999.
[14] His papers, held by the National Library of Wales, include correspondence with writers, performers and other public figures, such as Dannie Abse, Philip Burton, Hywel Teifi Edwards, T. S. Eliot, Gwynfor Evans, Patrick Heron, Marghanita Laski and R. S.