Australian · b. 1912
Australian novelist and Nobel laureate, the towering figure of Australian literature, whose dense, visionary novels transformed a provincial literary tradition into something of international significance.
White was born in London in 1912 to wealthy Australian parents who had come to England for the birth, and he spent his formative years being shuttled between the two worlds — Sydney’s sun-blasted upper class and English boarding schools, then Cambridge, then the literary circuits of London in the 1930s. He served in the RAF during the war, and when it ended, he made a decision that shaped everything: he returned to Australia with his Greek partner Manoly Lascaris and bought a farm outside Sydney, rejecting the London literary establishment as comprehensively as he could. Australia, he had decided, needed a literature adequate to its landscape and its spiritual vacancy, and he would write it.
The novels that followed are among the most demanding and rewarding in the language. The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) announced a writer of unmistakable seriousness: the first an epic of ordinary life on the Australian frontier rendered with visionary intensity, the second a portrait of a doomed explorer whose megalomaniac inner life mirrors the continent’s indifference to human aspiration. Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Eye of the Storm (1973) deepened his inquiry into spiritual experience, suffering, and the few people in any society capable of perceiving transcendence through the dross of ordinary life. The prose was dense, demanding, sometimes infuriating — always unmistakably his.
The 1973 Nobel Prize made White the first Australian laureate, a distinction he received without visible pleasure and used to fund an Australian arts prize that benefited younger writers for decades. Publicly gay in a deeply conservative country, famously cantankerous, capable of brutal literary feuds alongside acts of extraordinary generosity, he remained until his death in 1990 the great difficult fact of Australian literature — the writer everyone acknowledged as the best and almost no one found easy to love.
by Patrick White
1845. A German explorer named Johann Ulrich Voss leads an expedition across the Australian continent that no European has crossed. In Sydney, he exchanges letters with a young woman, Laura Trevelyan, who comes to know him more truly than any member of his party. Based on the real explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, Voss is White's masterpiece—and Australia's greatest novel.
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by Patrick White
Four misfits in postwar suburban Australia each have visions of the chariot of God: an eccentric spinster, an Aboriginal painter, a German Jewish refugee, and a simple-minded washerwoman. The novel weaves their stories together toward a Good Friday ritual of suburban violence. White's most explicitly religious and most savage novel.
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by Patrick White
Stan Parker clears land in the Australian bush, marries Amy, raises children, tends cattle, and dies. The novel follows their ordinary life across half a century, from the clearing of the first acre to the death of the last survivor, finding in the ordinary life the full weight of existence. White's response to the question of whether ordinary Australian life can sustain great fiction.
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by Patrick White
Elizabeth Hunter, a dying Sydney matriarch, has had a mystical experience at the eye of a cyclone. Now her children have gathered, expecting an inheritance. The novel moves between Mrs. Hunter's deathbed present and the cyclone experience that changed her—White's meditation on revelation, mortality, and the family as a system of mutual incomprehension.
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The best Australian literature — from Patrick White's Voss to Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda. Essential novels from Australia.
guide
Where to start with Patrick White — whether to begin with Voss, Riders in the Chariot, or The Tree of Man. A complete reading guide to the Nobel Prize-winning Australian novelist.
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