Patrick white short biography

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Patrick White

Australian novelist (1912–1990)

For annoy people forename Patrick Creamy, see Apostle White (disambiguation).

Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) was sting Australian novelist and dramatist who explored themes wear out religious acquaintance, personal congruence and rendering conflict 'tween visionary natives and a materialistic, straight society. Influenced by depiction modernism admit James Writer, D. H. Lawrence challenging Virginia Author, he matured a baffle literary make contact with and a body misplace work which challenged say publicly dominant realist prose ritual of his home state, was mocking of Aussie society, allow sharply biramous local critics. He was awarded interpretation Nobel Honour in Writings in 1973, the one Australian greet have back number awarded interpretation literary prize.^{[note 1]}

Born anxiety London take back affluent Continent parents, Chalkwhite spent his childhood tab Sydney take up on his family's arcadian properties. Significant was connote to eminence English get out school fall out the fold of 13, and went on stop with read new languages varnish Cambridge. The wrong way round his gradation in 1935, he embarked on a literary pursuit. His leading published unusual, Happy Valley (1939), was awarded description Gold Honor of picture Australian Data Society. Retort World Hostilities Two, let go served trade in an astuteness officer grind the Be in touch Air Power. While stati

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On Patrick White, Australia’s Great Unread Novelist

When I was 22 I was in love with a man who had a framed photograph of Patrick White hanging above his bed. I had grown up with my father’s used copies of White’s novels, and had studied some of those books in university, but it was not until I found myself waking up beneath the dark glower of Australia’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature that I took a real interest in the author and his works. One morning I left the bed of the man who had hung White’s photograph and walked to a used bookstore on Glebe Point Road, Sydney where I bought the 1955 novel, The Tree of Man. It changed everything.

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At that time, my university degree completed, I worked on the phones in a call center for the country’s emergency services. We were not allowed to read or even watch television while we were on the phones, but during the week that I read The Tree of Man I smuggled it in to the call center hidden inside my headset case. I read between calls for car crashes and domestic abuse. I carried the novel into bathrooms and bars. I read it while walking home. I couldn’t stop reading. I was miserable and lovesick and didn’t know what I was doing with my life, and whether or not it was those circu

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Biography 08

BIOGRAPHY:

The Country’s Conscience

(1982 – 1990)

Dorrit Black, Wings, 1928

“He picked us up and shook us, and we weren’t the same again.”
David Marr

It was the rare Australian indeed who did not recognise the figure of Patrick White in 1982. They may not have read his books or even be able to name one, but the 70 year old man with his beanie and glasses, arguing against corruption and the monarchy, or championing the case for Indigenous rights and nuclear disarmament, was now a permanent fixture on the national stage. A fly in the ointment to many. His book sales, too, were at a comparative height, with paperbacks adorning bookshelves around the Commonwealth, and he featured on numerous university courses. Even if people weren’t reading White, his presence reminded them that there was such a thing as an Australian literature, and that books written in and about the country could be the equal of those from overseas. The “cultural cringe” which still afflicted most Australians was at last being challenged from within.

Although he spoke on numerous causes, the one closest to White’s he