Patrick White Letters

Patrick White (1912-1990), author of The Living and the Dead, 1973 Nobel Laureate in Literature, officially Australian but also partly upper-crust Englishman by education, rejected alike English stuffiness and Australian philistinism. These letters, edited by his biographer David Marr, chronicle White's gradual reluctant engagement with the world: his interest in Jewish culture after an early ignorant anti-Semitism; his idyllic wartime period in West Africa; his passionate and rancorous anti-royalism, sparked by the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis when the British Queen's representative sacked the Prime Minister; his deep held belief in the validity of homosexual unions, based on his own life-long relationship. These letters give an inner glimpse of a mostly private life.